nothing in SERPs but the URL

for a new site using "site:site.com" search

[Camster]

Just did a search to see if Google is indexing anything for a site we recently launched. Used the "site:site.com -asdf" search. We are in there, but the SERPs are just a list of URLs with the "similar pages" link below them.

Google probably found links to these pages from our main site. Does this just mean that they haven't indexed the pages themselves but have the URLs in their list?

[rogerd]

Camster, you are correct in your assumption. Google knows about the page, but hasn't yet spidered/indexed it.

[qball0213]

I have a site now that's a couple months old and has had thousands of pages spiderd by google, but only the index is listed, while a site I launched last week already has all of it's pages in, only 7 or 8 total, and it's inbound links aren't as good, is there an easy way to tell if a domain I bought this year is somehow penalized?

[Camster]

Thanks rogerd. Just hadn't seen that before.

[ogletree]

I have about 8 URL only links in Google and they are all the pages I have the noindex nofollow tag on. I wish Google would just not have them in there at all.

[rogerd]

Ogletree, someone pointed this out to me a few months ago. Be sure your robots.txt doesn't also exclude those pages from being spidered. To see the noindex tag, Google has to spider the page. Otherwise, it will know the link exists (and list that) but won't spider the page (and realize the page isn't supposed to be indexed). Kind of counterintuitive, to say the least, but logical.

[qball0213]

Googleguy, anyone, is there a way to tell if a domain you bought was penalized?

[rogerd]

Qball, there's no published blacklist you can check. If you are buying a previously used name, I'd suggest using the Wayback machine to check on the site's past incarnations - look for any penalty-inducing techniques. Other than that, you may just have to see how the site behaves once you publish it and get some good linkage going.

[qball0213]

That's why I was asking, already got a 7 and a couple 5's pointing at it, and it's been published for a couple months now, and sites I've made within the past couple weeks are already in, with all of their pages, not just the index.

[ogletree]

Look and see if you are beating any sites with higher PR than yours in the serps that might show your real PR.

[markus007]

I've been complaining about this for a while..

During june i went and did a link: search and looked thru all my backlinks. Every single one had a description etc. When i did the exact same search today 20% of them have nothing but the URL listed. But when you click on the url the page linking to me comes up fine etc.

[rogerd]

Wow, that's pretty weird, markus. If Google hadn't yet spidered that page, how would it know your link was on it? It sounds like some kind of mismatch between the links database and the index. If any of the sites linking to you with the odd URL situation are fairly small, you could look at their pages with a site: search and see what their whole site looks like in the index. Maybe the pages got dropped for some reason and haven't been respidered yet, but the links to your site are still in a separate links database?

Another thing you could try is to choose one of the odd link pages, and do a very specific search for something on it (like a complex phrase). If it doesn't come up, then the mismatched DB theory might make sense. If the page is found with your search, the it sounds like some kind of malfunction in Google is simply not displaying titles/descriptions.

[markus007]

Roger its pretty wide spread. 2 of the links in question come from the yahoo directory, they where showing a month ago, now they are just showing the URL.

[EquityMind]

There may be a problem within your code that is not allowing Googlebot all the way onto your page. I had the same problem on one of my sites that only had a url listed for every page, when we dove into the code, we found we were using a browser detection string that was causing Googlebot to crash when it spidered our site. We fixed the problem and within a matter of days suddenly our title tags and descriptions began showing and then after the next crawl our category listings were added as well since we already had DMOZ listings.

[markus007]

It has nothing to do with my site.

Look at backlinks for ebay, CNN etc they all have it.

[qball0213]

Well I think my site is penalized or something, I thought I was being spidered by google, but after REALLY looking, I'm not. What would everyone recommend, starting over and doing a reinclusion report?

[EquityMind]

qball

Sticky me your url and I'll take a look.

Equitymind