why isn't google deep crawling my site?

homepage links not indexed for two weeks

[coldworld]

Hi

Recently our website hasn't been spidered like it used to be. Google's cached snapshot of our homepage is from the 7th February but the snapshot of the vast majority of other pages have not been indexed since 25th january. A couple of months ago Google used to index our homepage and links from the homepage every other day, so i'm confused over why everything has slowed down so much. our content is quite time critical so any pointers would be appreciated.

The amount of external links on our homepage has increased and now stands at 122, so i think this may be an issue? I've heard google won't follow more than 100 or so links on a page. can anyone confirm this or point me to articles that back this up?

Thanks, CW

[Borek]

I doubt thats the 100 link problem. While I suppose there are some limits for the page size and number of links, I doubt they are that small atm.

Check if you have not inadvertently changed something on your page. I once did a stupid coding mistake and while content was always displayed properly, server was returning 404 for every page.

[edited by: eelixduppy at 8:04 pm (utc) on Feb. 18, 2009]

[rainborick]

The suggestion that you keep the number of links on a page to 100 or less is in Google's guidelines for webmasters. They indicate this is more of a suggestion than a rule, but its mentioned twice, which I would take as an indication that the number is based on something specific in the way Google operates. Its likely that, as you say, they simply don't follow or record more than 100 links per page, rather than actually penalizing you.

Putting over 100 links on your main page seems like a really bad idea to me. Its certainly got to put a burden on your site's usability, and severely dillutes the distribution of PageRank through your site. Added to the fact that its likely that Google likely won't follow over 20% of those links, I'd say you need to think about restructuring the page to hold about 1/3 the current number of links.