google indexing page but not content

[snoz_woz]

from the 2nd July we noticed a large drop in visitors,
if i do google search for "site:www.widget.com" then it lists the pages from our site but with no discription and cached content (now 12 days after), for example

www.widget.com/detailyq7181.jhtml
Similar pages

www.widget.com/detailyq12028.jhtml
Similar pages

www.widget.com/standardEquipmentyq907.jhtml
Similar pages

www.widget.com/technicalSpecificationyq11632.jhtml
Similar pages

I have seen this for other sites too. it is probably related to Bourbon, i have tried reading through other posts relating to it but they are way to long with no real conclusion.

A little more about us, the site is fairly large like 15000 pages, and has been established for 3 years and always done well in google. We do not spam our site with loads of links or hidden pages, etc, just have a nice tree type flow branching out to the content.
Even our home page does not have its content cached now. Please help.......

[encyclo]

Check the technical stuff first: is your site still being indexed by Googlebot? Do you have a robots.txt and does it validate [searchengineworld.com]? Are you sure you haven't inadvertently banned or blocked Googlebot?

[Pat1975]

My site face something very similar. The main domain is still in the index but all the subdomains have gone. It left only the url of the root pages (when I search it with the url like subdomain.domain.com). The PR for both main and subdomain also dropped to zero. It's just happened yesterday.

[bumpski]

My two cents.

Coincidently around the time of Bourbon I had pulled my absolute link from my home page to my conventional sitemap.html page. This page had absolute links to virtually all pages in my site. Since I use Front Page (2000), my internal linking, other than my sitemap.html, is primarily relative. (Historically I had found the absolute links boosted my backlinks and therefore PR, that'll get an argument started!)

After I pulled the link to my sitemap.html file, my site went from fully indexed to about 20% of the pages correctly indexed, the remaining 80% being URL only (partially indexed is Google's term). Google reliably crawled all pages many times, they remained URL only! I had already done the 301 redirect and actually wondered at the time whether this caused the problem (it didn't), but my site was properly indexed anyway.

When I restored that absolute link from my home page to my sitemap.html file, my pages were reindexed in the next couple crawls. This sitemap.html file is very low in my relative internal linking structure.

Google appears to be showing a strong dislike to relative linking only fully indexing the highest level pages. And without the sitemap my linkage structure is much more hierarchical. (I was doing all this fooling around, trying to elevate my homepage PR and not waste PR on pages like my sitemap! Don't want to be HiJacked.)

Boom, I drop one critical link just as the Bourbon starts flowing!

I also have implemented sitemap.xml with priority, but I'm confident the absolute linking versus relative linking was the key. Why?

I pulled my link to my sitemap.html page again! Guess what started to happen, pages were going URL only! I still have relative internal linkage, but the sitemap.html with absolute linking is what I believe is keeping my site in the Google Index.

I'll probably go with full absolute linking, (frankly I shouldn't have to), but it may prove problematic with Front Page 2000. (FP has it's advantages)

[Pat1975]

Just to update that now, even my main domain left only the url in the index. Some inside pages are still listed with titles and descriptions. But I guess that they will all gone soon. I wonder what happened to my site. If it's banned, why don't they remove it at all, why left the url?

[snoz_woz]

Thankyou bumpski i will try your suggestion. You mention hijack, what is this?
To update you, i now think this is the result of bourbon, we too did not even have our domain indexed at one point, but now a week on it is indexed again, however many pages are still not indexed. I tried typing "site:www.competitors_sites.com" into google, they too are suffering the same.
Try typing into google "site:www.your_site_url.com" and i bet you too will see the same problem. For us our most important pages where not indexed, so it caused a big problem. Maybe it is because they are similar to other pages on our site, maybe because URL's are relative, maybe beacause i have not done a sitemap.xml, maybe they just need re-indexing again? Any ideas?

[Pat1975]

Snoz_woz, I found this interesting thread:

[webmasterworld.com...]

Not sure about yours but I think this is possibly the answer to my situations. I do found some www.subdomain.domain.com pages in google index and they are indexed properly with some PR.