Product ranges considered spam?

Such as a list of products with similar names

[TheDave]

My site has many pages which list many products, all with a slightly diferent name:

ie.

BW1 - Blue Widget, 12cm, $44.50
BW2 - Light Blue Widget, 12cm, $44.50
GW1 - Green Widget, 14cm, $55.60

Could this be seen as "Widget" spam by google? On the site there are also pictures and tables around the text

It's really frustrating me, I read all these posts of people who say things like "google's just crawled 1500 pages of my site", where for the last 2 months google has visited mine twice, and in the search results it does not have a cached page, only a page with a meta-refresh of 0. Could I be banned or something?

I've pretty much developed this site with complete ignorance of search engines, and in the last 2 months, since I've been trying to get my site to perform better from the search engines, it just keeps going further and further down the rankings. Maybe I just suck as a SEO? Am I trying to hard? :(

[DenRomano]

I have many many pages that look just the same with slight product name the only difference. I have had good luck with google with it. Some 34,000 pages indexed and the bot visits and deep crawls each month.

[Brett_Tabke]

> Am I trying to hard?

There could be something about your template that Google doesn't like. Checklist:

- Does the site validate or come close to validating?
A wide array of html errors can cause spiders to reject pages or miss links.

- Is the site crawlable? Standard href urls?
I had a guy that couldn't figure out why his pages weren't getting listed. He'd based his whole site on javascript and form style navigation.

- Dynamic content and links crawlable?
If you have a dynamic site, what is the spider seeing? Too many form urls generally have a limit. Go with stock urls for all your critical pages.

- Robots.txt valid?
If you are using a robots.txt, is it valid? So much as one misplaced character can cause robo accidents.

- Inbound links?
Spiders don't care to index sites without many inbound links. Every page should be linked to at least one other page on the site.

- Directory listings?
Se's are using directories such as Dmoz and Yahoo as a sort of independent quality assurance check. If it isn't listed in one of the major directories, it may be difficult to get a search engine to index a site.

- Mouse in a giants world?
Late last year I worked with a site on a specific keyword. When we started the process, the information given to me was along the lines, "my site just can't get rankings". It went into great detail about their search engine failures. Turned out, the site was a 20 page affiliate site competing in one of the most competitive categories around. eg: it's difficult for "joes windows site" to compete with Microsoft.com.

[TheDave]

Thanks for the feedback.

Brett, I have checked out all of the things you mentioned, except the last, not much I can do about that one. Aside from that, we are certainly not mice ;) My site uses very little form navigation. The forms I use are for submitting orders, calculating costs and search form. On the home page there are at least 3 href style links to the next most important page. From that page (the next most important) there are lots of href links to everything.

[Brett_Tabke]

Sounds like you need to hit the "reciprocal links circuit" and drum up some inbound links. That will raise your profile, raise your crawl rate, and ultimately raise your rankings.