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My website used to be quite small...only about 10 pages. Google indexed it just fine. But, when I added about 60 pages, Google dropped all of my listings to just urls (no title and descriptions) AND my index page stopped coming up in the serps (no change in pagerank, however).
Some have suggested that my linking structure in the following form is dangerous:
[example.com...]
because of the 'default.asp'. All of my internal pages use this format.
What is it about the default.asp that could have caused problems with google. I noticed that while Yahoo crawls and indexes my site witn no problem, it truncates my urls to a shorter form that does NOT include the default.asp. There seems to be something about the default.asp that the search engines just dont like. And Yahoo seems to have found a way to handle it and manipulate the url into a form that it can work with.
I discovered that I can also manually change my url structure to the following form:
[example.com...]
Which removes the 'default.asp' and also removes one of the argument parameters so that only one is left. Oddly enough, when I use this form, the pagerank assigned to it by google is the same as that of the root page (pr7), whereas the longer version containing the default.asp has been reduced to PR1.
I am just trying to understand what is going on, what I need to learn, and if changing all of my urls to this shorter form would help me get fully crawled and indexed in google again.
Thanks for your help/advice!
Chris
[edited by: ciml at 10:31 am (utc) on Dec. 13, 2004]
[edit reason] Examplified [/edit]
Googel itself does say within its pages that it can read URL's with &'s in it. Indeed, if you look at some of the URL's that come up in the listings this is very true.
However i have heard that it recommends only using a couple of &'s if possible. We use &'s and several of our sites have been listed well.
I haven't ever heard that it could be the default.asp part. I wouldn't think this is true ..... although i would be interested to hear peoples opinions as we use default.asp all the time!
What I do to avoid these issues altogether is to combine multiple variables into one variable and then split them up via an ASP script. Example: "http://www.example.com/?var_1=abc&var_2=xyz&var_3=123", instead use a delimiter and simply pass one variable, like such: "http://www.example.com/?var=abc-xyz-123", then in your ASP script split the ONE variable apart into three variables and process them just like you normally would.
Obviously whatever delimiter you choose can't be present in your variables or this would cause problems.
Nice one!
[example.com...]
I have changed the url structure throughout my website to this shorter format. I hope this will stop some of the problems I have been experiencing with Google not doing complete indexing of my site (internal pages listed with url only). But I fear that since both forms of the url point to the same page that other search engines will see it as duplication. I dont know how to tell them that the first form of the url no longer is valid and that the url has changed.
