Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Regards.
A url only listing usually indicates that Gbot knows that the page exists and theoretically should at a future date index the page.
If the pages are not new I would suggest;
1. check your robots txt to see if gbot has been disallowed
2. check your meta tags for the same
3. make sure there no seesion cookies are being used as this can prevent gbo from indexing your site
That may be purely coincidental, of course...
Evidently so, by your question and many others, it is because Google is no longer functioning correctly.
"getting dropped for particular keywords,"
I wonder what this means? Too high keyword density or spamming meta tags perhaps?
Are you seroius?! It is not reasonable!
Every thing is fine, no one of the above cases appeared to me!
I noticed this case for most dynamic sites that have a url like the following format:
www.sitename.com/pagename.asp?id=8764
I did all the checks people have listed - all clear.
I've no idea what the cause was, but after about 6 weeks, everything cleared up and the pages reappeared fully indexed.
I don't find it particularly heartwarming to have a bleak spell like that, and the moreso because at the end of the URL only phase, my pages came back with me having made no changes to them.
The only common factor with the two sites is that they essentially had a splash page so that despite the homepage having a high PR and lots of links, the interior pages only really had one way in from the outside - via the one page that sat below the homepage.
I don't do that any more - I have more deep links to give me more ways in....
DerekH
it is because Google is no longer functioning correctly
In my view this is absolutely right. Yes, some cases are due to problems with the site itself, but not all.
My view is that it is due to the way Google processes its updates. After Allegra about 10% of the pages of one of my sites lost their snippets and caches and became URL only - yet they still have toolbar PR. I have also noticed that some page caches have reverted to old versions.
Some of these pages were crawled just before the update. My guess is that the info somehow gets lost in the process. Perhaps cache and snippet info is kept on different databases to the urls? I wish someone could explain it to me!
I am sure there is nothing wrong with these pages and the solution will eventually correct itself as Google crawls the site, but its very frustrating. A site with a high PR may not even notice this problem if Google crawls daily.
How many pages does Google crawl per week? If the site hasn't have high PR it could take an age for Google to get around to reindexing them all. You could look for a specific page in the logs to see when Google last crawled it.
No whats wrong here is Google can NOT handle all the new sites they inculded 3-4 month ago, so there indexing has become a problem.
Now we see different domains in site:mydomain.com search, To early omitted results, many Supplemental results, URL only pages, this realy looks like a spidering/server problem, they just cant handle all the sites anymore.
So if I was you I would not change anything
you say most of the pages are in the form page.php?id=1234
I had this problem a few years ago, this was a new site, google didn't take any of these pages. Specifically with 'id='. I used mod rewrite on these to make them appear static and then they were taken.
In december I lost a lot of pages to the symptoms you describe, they were dynamic pages again but not with 'id=' more 'cat=' and various other things. I have just changed them all to static url and used 301 redirects.
If you do this beware of the page rank going to 0 until it updates.
In the course of this I found that there was a problem with when I deleted categories/pages and google came to get them again. My site didn't give a 404 it pulled up stuff from other categories. (it used code I had written for another circumstance)
I have also done a 301 on [mysite.com...] to [mysite.com...]
I have moved host, the old server was heavily loaded.
I moved region so can watch google retake pages fresh.
I had a small html error on my pages, no closing tag for something, showed fine in the browser, don't know if it would matter.
I am no expert on files but there was a fairly long line in my generated html that I have shortened. (I was changing anything here)
I suspected duplicate content, but should point out this was paragraphs of 'product' description not entire exact pages.
Some people say do nothing, but I couldn't just leave it and hope so I made all the changes I had wanted to make anyway but hadn't when I was ranked ok.
My site is being residered and taken I think but PR on internal pages is all screwed at the moment.
Yahoo likes my new site and I am doing better than before, MSN is slightly worse at the moment and is still sending stuff to some of the old url, but roughly the same. Google is very slow spidering. MSN, Yahoo and Ask i'm pretty sure have been through the lot.
Thank you Lorel but how can I know if there are any redirects in the results?
I checked a few of my pages which were url only after Allegra.
a) Pages crawled 12 Feb now have correct cache dated 12 Feb.
b) But pages crawled 10 or 11 Feb are still url only.
c) One page now has its snippet back in serps, but no cache.
However using Google toolbar brings up an obsolete cache dated 23 Feb 2004.
I suspect things will slowly get back to normal as Google crawls the site - and then it will go wrong again at the next update.
Do an allinurl:YourSite.com search and see if there are any redirects in the results.Thank you Lorel but how can I know if there are any redirects in the results?
The URL will have their domain first and then yours on the end of the same url.
Just done the allinurl thing on my site and was amazed to see a page showing that does not even have our url in it. I thought it was just another link to us.
The link to us from their domain is with this added:
/modules.php?name=Web_ Links&l_op=visit&lid=1151
Why does this show up in the allinurl search?
