Will my pages URL prevent SE finding them?

A basic question, but very important to me.

[gilbertl]

I am a website owner rather than a designer. In order to add new pages easily to my website I can use my control panel to input "extra" pages. I've added quite a few over the last year. None of these extra pages have any Google rankings or show any PR at all. In fact when using one tool, which I found to check rankings, it found my normal pages (PR=5) but threw up an error on these extra pages (domain name contained illegal characters).

The main pages which are fine are like this:
[mydomain.com...]

The "extra" pages I have look like this (not sure if I'm allowed to put actual url in post?):
[mydomain.com...]

Is the question mark preventing SE from seeing any of these additional pages?

Help very much appreciated.

[gilbertl]

Hmmm, maybe because it is an obvious answer that I should know, or perhaps just too difficult that no one will reply?

I may have put this in the wrong area of the forum I guess, I will see if there is a more appropriate one, but I thought it was technical?

regards,

Lawrence.

[mm1220]

I see urls with?var=value in google serps all the time.
I woldn't worry about it as long as they're not too long/complicated.

[gilbertl]

Thank you MM. It does seem odd that NONE of my Extra pages are ranked, but ALL my other pages are. Even minor pages like "contact us" and "help" pages are ranked but "Extra" pages that I know a lot of people refer to, are white ranked.

[submitx]

Are those extra pages linked from your main page or a subpage that is linked to your main page?

For the best ranking you wanna make sure they are directly linked from your main page and infact all your most important pages should all have links to each other.

Did you check with site:www.yourdomain.com command to see if your pages are indexed? maybe the sites are too similar and only a portion of them are being indexed for that reason.

[gilbertl]

Certainly one of my most important "Extra" pages is linked from the home page and it is still a white rank. I noticed that these type of php pages on the site are ranked:
[mydomain.com...]

But none of the extra pages of which I have about 50!

Their content is all quite different, but is the fact that they all are called "extra" then a page number the issue? ie:
[mydomain.com...] and
[mydomain.com...]
etc.

regards,

Lawrence.

[gilbertl]

Oh, I just used the google command as suggested above and it does find the extra pages, so they presumably have been found by the SE, but not one ranked, all white rankings? No other page other than the "extra" pages have a white ranking, so it is more of a mystery.

[txbakers]

don't fret about it.

if google can find your home page, your visitors will find the rest.

[submitx]

Well you may have two porblems here.

1) The pages that are not directly linked from main page would not get as good as a ranking vs. if they were linked from the main page.

2) Your problem is very common problem facing many. It is called the Sandbox effect, which is a new algorithm by Google. There are a few other threads about this. Basically Google is penalizing new pages or sites and not assigning them PageRanks for at least 4 months, maybe more...There are people here that have had no pageranks for about 6 months or so.

[wheel]

If I recall my readings, Google can spider the url after the '?', but gags on the '&'. Either way, I do know it will spider url's like you've described.

Nevertheless, you should look into the apache redirect command.

You also want to make sure that your site doesn't server cookies or session id's to search engine spiders. I believe the way to do this is to have a list of search engine spiders. Check for them each time a page is visited and don't serve the session id's or cookies.

With those three things (apache redirect for dynamic to static url's, no session id's or cookies) your site should look identical to a static site. You'll need a tech involved to get all this done though - and there are probably plenty of easier things to do for the engines before you get here (I was #1 in Google for my admittedly small terms while I was committing all three of the above offenses).

[gilbertl]

Thank you all, I feel a bit more reassured and I will look into the redirect and cookie business.

kind regards,