URL only in SERPS

...and no cached pages either

[jsaipe]

Google SERPs for my site often show only the title tag and not the description. And furthermore they don't show a cached page link in these cases either.

What does this mean?

It seems to be very random as some of these pages have good content.

J

[Reid]

As for SiteMaps, I did get a complete crawl and now this is very interesting. It picked up almost all of the pages with the title and description -- Yippie Skippie! -- but now, the other url-only pages are still there too. So now I have 2 links to every page for about half of my forum.

Give google a bit of time to figure it out. it probably will.
If you want instant results like Russian Roulette - you could try submitting robots.txt to the URL removal tool.
Most of the poist Iv'e seen from people who went with google sitemaps.
1. site goes URL-only
2. titles and descriptions appear within a few days.

Maybe yours just went a little sideways - I think it would figure it out eventually.

[yanyading]

My web site is U-O too, Gbot visit only robots.txt and index.asp each day, yes, I did the sitemap.xml but NO DEEP CRAWL till now.

I think we must wait the GOOGLE DEEP CRAWL to have the title + describtion back...

[voices]

I know a site that has been url only for about a month. This is the second time it has happened. I have seen it happen to big brand sites. I asked a google engineer about it at WebmasterWorld and he didn't seem to know the cause. Said it was probably just on the fringe. Not much of an answer.

[hafgan]

We have had this same experience. Google shows there are about 17000 of our pages listed, but most now only have URL only and our traffic has gone way down. We haven't changed anything - we have been around with an ecommerce site for almost 8 years now that sells computer and networking cables, and have never experienced this. Has anyone heard from Google what is going on? I don't think we are getting intentionally penalized because I don't see any common denominator between other sites experiencing this.

Added:
By the way, I have verified our robots.txt is correct and have has our sitemap successfully submitted and accepted on Monday - still no change.

[hafgan]

We have a very popular site that has been around since 1997. We have never used any questionable SEO tactics on the site. A few weeks ago our traffic started falling and upon researching I found only our URL was listed in Google.

I think what might have happened is this:
A few weeks ago I transferred some of our additional domain names to a different company. These domain names are additional suffixes (.net, .org, etc) and similar to our main domain except with slight misspelling. (The letter C is missing out of the center)

I wanted these sites to forward to our original site. It looks like Domain Name Forwarding with Masking was turned on. So when I did a site:otherdomain.com -qwerrew search it showed up with pages with Titles and Descriptions (Because people link to the other domain names in addition to our main one.)

Question: Could this cause what we are experiencing?
Why would Google choose this domain name to store in it's ndex instead of our original and older domain name?

I have turned domain masking off. Will this fix it? How do I get our main site back in?

Thanks for the help.

[AlexK]

hafgan:

I have turned domain masking off. Will this fix it? How do I get our main site back in?

One of the positive things that you can do is to 301 the duplicate domain-pages to your main site. G appears to exercise a penalty on duplicate pages (the `appears' is there because no-one has definite info on this). Look also for duplication in www- and non-www-pages (ie h*tp://www.mysite.com/ and h*tp://mysite.com/) and 301 those as well.

If the experience on my own site is any guide, it will take some time. Pages from an old free-domain, which was redirected to my principle domain, showed Title+Desc whilst the identical main-domain page was URL-only. A 301 was put in place on 31 Jan 2005. Site page-hits began to fall in Dec 2004, reached a nadir in early April (80% drop), and has been slowly crawling back up to previous levels ever since (currently still only 80% of last year's figures).

I reported the %age of URL-only SERPS for a site:mysite.com in msg #:7. A G search just now has identical figures to that 2-week-old message.

[dickbaker]

I've just had an experience that's unlike most of the others posted here.

I have many individual product pages on my site: Acme widgets, Bob's widgets, Best Widgets, etc. Back in March, they finally started getting on the first page. Now every one is first-page.

Today I did a check on all the brands. "Acme widgets" is #4, but there's no page title or description, just the URL. "Bob's widgets" is still at #8, but also no title or description, just URL.

Another brand, "Best widgets," is anywhere from #2 to #10 on the various datacenters, although it has title and description. All of the other brands I have on my site are pretty constant, i.e. #5 or #6, with both title and meta tag description.

Weird.

[Reid]

I noticed back in April tht google stopped using snippets from pages and started using the description tag. This happens in the site: results anyway.
If the description is too long (over 155 characters)the google will cut it off at the end but if it is too short (guess under 60-80 characters) then google will ignore it completely.
All my short (lazy) description pages were URL only until I lengthened the descriptions.

[webdude]

Just checked again. Since using sitemaps, 65% of all the url only pages are gone and have been replaced by normal pages with title and description. Seems to be working somewhat, but it is taking a long time for the change to take place.

Just a note here...

[alex77]

webdude,

how long did it take it to have your title and description back since you submitted a sitemap.

[wattsnew]

Here's a new one....

"site:" query showing URL-only listings which omit the subdirectory...

http://www.example.com/pages/widget.htm becomes listed as
http://www.example.com/widget.htm

The listing without the subdirectory is replacing a full listing: Title, Snip, URL.

I even have a listing with the subdir and no file...
http://www.example.com/pages/

Quite a mess - and probably creating duplicates.

Has anyone had this pleasure?

[webdude]

alex77

That 65% took about a week. It looks like it is still working things out. It picked up 16 more pages last night with title and description. Started slowly but seems to be picking up steam.

[webdude]

wattsnew

I've seen that too. At first I thought the URL was truncated because of length, but I can't figure out why there is truncating at all. I have not seen a sub-directory dropped though, that is a new one. What I have found on some of my URL only links is just part of the url, usually a piece chopped of at the end.

ie...

[mysite.com...]

Not sure why that would happen. I actually searched the whole site thinking I had a bad link in there. It seems to be a Google problem.

[wiseapple]

We have multiple directories which contain our articles. All the articles in one directory have gone complete URL only and is getting no spider activity. Other directories are proper in the serps. It has been this way for a month or so. Any ideas?

I have an idea to move this directory to a new directory and use a 301-redirect to the new directory. Does anyone think this is a good idea?

Thanks.

[surfer67]

Here's my experiences since submitting the sitemap.

I submitted it about a month ago. A few days after it was downloaded, approximately 100 new pages were indexed. An additional 100 or so pages were indexed with each passing week. This friday it completely indexed my entire sitemap. All 3600 pages.

I guess it's just a matter of time. Submit it and don't worry about it. It'll get around to indexing all your pages eventually.

Surfer67

[glengara]

*I noticed back in April tht google stopped using snippets from pages and started using the description tag.*

Looking back Reid, was this factor of any significance, IYO?

I'l looking at one PHP site, 500 pages, G indexed textual content, not one snippet...

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