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I have a couple of sites which I've designed using Dreamweaver templates and I've found that Google has only indexed the header and footer (ie the template bits) but not the page content.
I've been searching for previous postings of this problem but every post I've found on the subject suggests that it should work OK.
Does anyone have any ideas of what I should look for?
Many thanks in anticipation or your help!
Bob.
I would not worry about it. As long as your pages have at least 15% difference in them you should be ok.
Thanks for the reassurance. The template part of my pages is only the header, menu in left column, and menu at bottom. All else is different.
I doubt if there would be a problem if it's a big site with plenty of links and unique content on the pages; I'm not sure if anyone's looked at enough of them to be able to determine anything for sure.
I have seen pages knocked out with 20% difference, but they also used a meta refresh to new pages with different file extensions with the template part stripped out of the original pages. They haven't recovered rankings; the alt text is still all there linked to the homepage. The only pages still ranking for them at all are a few interior pages.
It's nothing to get bent out of shape over, just something to watch out for in case there's any sign of a problem.
I just now checked again on a rather small website that had been running the top graphic with anchor text in the alt attribute. Originally the site was listed fine and ranked well, and then at a certain point *all* the pages ended up being listed with that alt text alone when checking and nothing more.
Checking site:www.domain.com now - the pages that were changed all show normal descriptions. The ones still with the keyword alt attribute in the linked logo graphic have ONLY the alt text with ... afterward - and that's it. Stops short right there, nothing more.
Checking site:www.domain.com now - the pages that were changed all show normal descriptions. The ones still with the keyword alt attribute in the linked logo graphic have ONLY the alt text with ... afterward - and that's it. Stops short right there, nothing more.
Marcia, I am not sure that I am getting the point here? What you describe is exactly what I am seeing on my site when I check with site:www.mysite.com. But isn't this what you would expect since this text is what is actually at the top of every page?
This only happens with a site:www.domain.com. When my site is found using any other keywords it is displayed with normal descriptions and snippets.
Am I misunderstanding something here?
--the pages that were "fixed" and had the keyword phrase in the anchor text of the top logo graphic taken out show a normal snippet description based upon what's on the page
--the pages that weren't fixed, that still have the keyword phrase in the anchor text of the top logo graphic, do not have anything from the page in the snippet description - just the couple of words in the anchor text.
Same search with all the pages showing - some are broke and some are not broke, depending on whether I took that alt keyword phrase out. One search, two different ways pages are showing up.
I've seen this on a number of sites. In fact with some, where they have the alt text and some regular text repeated across all the page tops as well have just those things showing and nothing from further down on the pages in the description.
google comes every other day. it has been like this for months. every other day our index page gets updated with a new date for the previous day. we have TONS of incoming links. google coming is no issue. as of right know, we have about 17,000 sub pages, according to google. and every sub page definitely has unique content, tons of diff accommodations with different pricing yada yada. yea, im sure we will be ok, so far so good in googles eyes. the question of how many pages get crawled, im not exactly sure. off our index page we have a link to each state. so the spider can crawl every single page. kinda like a mini directory. im not sure how much google can consume in one crawl, but, stuff throughoout the site seems to update within 2 weeks. thats deep pages. :) i think we should be ok
--the pages that were "fixed" and had the keyword phrase in the anchor text of the top logo graphic taken out show a normal snippet description based upon what's on the page--the pages that weren't fixed, that still have the keyword phrase in the anchor text of the top logo graphic, do not have anything from the page in the snippet description - just the couple of words in the anchor text.
Marcia, is this not what you would expect when checking with site:www.mydomain.com, i.e. that it will display the first few words of text that it finds since no KWs were used in the search.
This happens on my site but just about all of the pages are indexed and all the text appears to be in the cache. Is there any significance in this? (A normal search using KWs does display proper snippets?)
My apologies if I am missing something obvious but it's Friday and I am tired :o)
I just checked again and this time I counted. On the "normal" pages that were fixed, there are about 19-20 words as the descriptions - as you say, the first section of words appearing on the page.
BUT - on the ones with the keyword phrase anchor text in the top logo graphic that links to the homepage, it isn't 19-20; it's only the 2 or 3 words in the alt attribute. That's it - it stops right there.
That isn't normal, and anything that's not normal, particularly if it's occurring on a site that ran into a problem, and has also been seen on other sites running into problems needs to be looked into further.
Maybe it's not happening on all, but if it's happening on some and a site with the same characteristic is running into problems, then that's one of the things that it can't hurt to change - along with other things that might need changing, which more often than not is the case.
This site in particular, for example, is seriously lacking related inbound links and since the keyword phrase is in the domain name, put together with going into overkill on anchor text within the site, that'll have to be cut back on and the anchor text varied so it falls within a safe margin.
I appreciate the point that you are making but I am just wondering if it is significant? If you use the site:www.domain.com tool is it not the case that the algo knows that you are not seeking descriptions, etc. Does it assume that you just want to know how many pages from the site are indexed and subsequently that the descriptions are not particularly relevant with this search.
On my sites that use common headers and template data this does not appear to be causing a ranking problem and proper descriptions are displayed when the pages are found on a regular search.
TinTin99 are full descriptions displayed on your pages when they are found with a regular search? Is there any evidence that this is damaging your rankings?
I did note that on one site I have used the word "logo" as part of the linking alt text and it does not happen there. Do you think that it worth placing this word in the description on one of the other sites to see if this changes anything?
Looks like Google may have trown the switch on this..
also take a look at our very own WW logo for another clue on what is appropriate in this monolithic aspect of most sites..
or just roll your eyes in a unified downward position, cross them and see what's under your nose...(the most obvious place to start)
