URL-Only Listings

What did the URL represent?

[simonhe]

I found some websites have this situation. Google indexed many URLs ( maybe thousands ), but it displayed only URL not description & title.

What did it represent? And whether do we have measure to solve it or not?

Thanks.

[g1smd]

It can be pages where it knows about the URL as it has seen sites linking to that URL but hasn't yet spidered and indexed the page itself.

Most often it seems to be pages that it thinks are duplicates. The most common cause of that is where you provide the same content at www.domain.com as at domain.com but fail to provide a 301 redirect to force a canonical URL for the site.

[powerfulponder]

I have been trying to figure this out for a while. What do you mean, Google thinks it's duplicate content? How could G know if they haven't picked up the page yet?

[g1smd]

My two paragraph reply was two separate unrelated items, both of which can be the cause of URL-only listings.

[Bluey]

Hi, Just wondered if anyone else was in the same boat...

I have a new site that is well indexed in MSN and Yahoo. It was fully indexed in Google and suddenly most pages went to URL only and then 70 or so pages were dropped leaving me with 15 pages of which 10 are URL only - not great!

I was doing a manual sitemap daily but have since automated it (much less hassle).

Anyway, am adding fresh content daily so patience is the key as ever.

Anyone else experiencing the same or can offer any hope?

Cheers.

[longen]

I had some URL's only pages some time ago which got cleared up, this is what i did:

A) Since there might be duplicate content issues involved i cleaned up the pages by making sure the META Tags (keywords, descriptions, titles) were relevant to the content. If you use templates for new pages it is easy to end up with the same tags for multiple files. I also deleted some identical text headings which appeared at the top of a number of pages but which were not essential.

B) I put temporary links in the "What’s New" page to the URL only pages, so that gBot would find another path to them - if you own other web-sites put links on them as well.

[anallawalla]

longen,

Most of my thin aff sites have unique title/kwd/desc tags, and I noticed the same problem happening to another WW regular who has genuinely self-authored content plus aff links on those pages. I think it has more to do with aff content than repeating header tags. One of my business sites has proper titles and snippets for the business pages, but some of its deeper pages with aff content have gone URL-only.

The other symptom is that the site: command for such sites shows just one result with full title and snippet. Rest are URLs only.