sjwinslow - 3:56 pm on Jun 2, 2006 (gmt 0)

The situation with Google not adding pages or dropping previously indexed pages to their index is complex and unlikely that one cure-all will resolve everyone’s problems. I have a relative new site (started in Feb. of this year) that experienced the typical problems of having +10,000 pages indexed and dropped to about 100. This is really just a hobby, genealogy site, but for the site to have any value to others the names and birth date and location must be searchable by others.

After many weeks of experiencing continued loss of pages regardless of the clean-up activities taken that are recommended so frequently on this board another approach was taken. The site’s PR is low (in the 2-3 range on the PR tool) but there are about 150 inbound links and the site is crawled continually by Google. The primary pages that contain the ancestor information were 3 clicks away (level 4) from the home page. Observation indicated that almost all of the upper three levels were indexed in Google but my most important 4th level contained over 10,500 pages, almost none of which remained indexed.

The navigation structure of the site was changed to move the 4th level pages to the 2nd level. This seriously exceeded the 100 links per page that is recommended in the Google guidelines but quite frankly I had little to loose. Within a week my site moved from having about 150 pages indexed to having 10,600 real (searchable, not supplemental) pages indexed.

I know this approach flies in the face of some of the hard-liners’ recommendations and is not easy or possible for others to follow. However, it worked wonders for my site and turned it from a worthless, unfindable site, to one that ranks high for all the ancestor names on the site for Google and increased traffic from Yahoo and MSN by double in one week. I'm sure mileage will vary.