Why won't google update its index for a site?

[jam2005]

I recently took over maintenance for a website and have had an interesting experience. We redesigned about six sites and launched them with a new look, but mostly the same content. It has been about two months since we did this and Google has updated its index for all of the sites except one. This site has been around for two or three years and has a PR of 0, but it still shows up in the results when you type in the URL so I don't think it has been banned. I just started working here so I don't know how long it hasn't had a PR.

When I type site:www.example.com all of the old pages come up, but none of the new pages are showing up. We submitted a sitemap using google sitemaps a few weeks ago and google spidered all of the pages within a few days, but they are still not showing up in the index. Has anyone had a similar experience and if so is there anything I can do to get google to update its index?

[edited by: ciml at 9:42 am (utc) on July 29, 2005]
[edit reason] Examplified. [/edit]

[ciml]

If the sites have been hosted for some time, but have zero PageRank then it would seem that the sites don't have links from pages with PageRank.

Crawl frequency is dependent on PageRank to a significant extent, so I suspect that is why it is taking a long time.

[jam2005]

Thanks! I didn't think of that. I checked and Google shows about 24 backlinks for the site and all of them have pagerank except one. Also, google has crawled the site completely, it just hasn't updated the information in its index.

[garyr_h]

Something else you might want to think about is checking out Google Sitemaps.

[walkman]

>> This site has been around for two or three years and has a PR of 0

something it's wrong, especially since it has 20+ links even with google (that means that it really has many more). It doesn't take much at all to get a PR3, or even even PR2. I would try to email Google and see what's up

[strangerrr]

Google has updated its index for all of the sites except one.

G dosn't treat's all sites in same manner ...

try to get some good links from relevant high quality sites ... and just wait ... :)

[jam2005]

Does anyone know the best way to contact Google for this type of a situation so that they will respond? I have tried contacting them a few times and keep getting the canned responses...

[g1smd]

They are always canned responses, and in my experience many times they aren't even the right cut and paste answer!

I don't hold any faith in the abilities of the people that are employed to answer the email at Google.

[webdude]

This is EXACTLY what is happening to me. Sitemap not working for just one particular site. The only difference with this site from yours is that it has a PR 5. I just don't get it. Contacting G does no good, just the canned response. The site is being crawled, but no new pages in the index.

I have tried sitemaps with several other sites with great success, but for some reason, this site does not get listed. Most of the pages listed are old, dead URLs. I ended up creating the old pages again and doing a 301 to similar new pages. A pain, but I don't know what else to do. At least now when users click a dead link, instead of a 404, they get to view a page on the site.

I also tried the URL removal tool to get rid of the old pages. Request denied on every 404 page. DUH... I don't get it. Tried it multiple times with multiple pages. Checked headers, yada yada yada.

The site seems hatched for some reason. Maybe a redesign (back in March) created some sort of sandbox for the site.

mmmmmmm

[jam2005]

Does the sandbox keep Google from updating the listings for a site? I seems that after two years that a site should be out of the sandbox.

[jam2005]

It looks like Google updated its index this weekend. Now when I search for www.example.com I get the message "Sorry, no information is available for the URL www.example.com" and when I click on the 'pages from the site' link there is a link to www.example.com. Does anyone know what would cause this?

[bradley phil]

sounds like a ban from the index to me... my commiserations :x

[jam2005]

I can't figure out what's going on. The important pages all disappeared from the index (home page for example), but some of the other pages that were not showing up are indexed now. Unfortunatly, I don't think that anyone is going to be searching for our checkout page, privacy policy, or partners page.