Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I wonder if anyone can help me. A few months ago I added around 100 pages of content to my three year old site. These were quickly indexed by Google and now Google shows 173 pages using the site:mysite operator.
A few days later I remember searching for these newly added pages and finding that the content all seemed to be indexed and I could find them by searching for a text string from anywhere on the page.
Now, even though the pages still appear in the list, nothing is returned when I search using the content, headlines or title of the pages. It's as if the pages are there but not retreivable.
The only thing I remember doing between being able to find them and the current state is adding a simple .txt sitemap. I'd appreciate any advice.
Many thanks in anticipation,
David.
<Sorry, no specifics.
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[edited by: tedster at 8:53 pm (utc) on Nov. 19, 2006]
First of all welcome to Webmasterworld. It's a big place, with plenty of knowledge to discover.
From your post, you indicated that you more than doubled the size of your site in a very short period of time. While I don't have anything definitive on this, there have been reports that adding too much content at once can cause a 'red flag' in the algorithm that causes your pages not to rank in Google.
It's similar to what frequently happens with new websites: they will rank for a few days or weeks for their target terms, and then they will fall off the rankings. The amount of time in purgatory varies, but is typically about 9 months. One suggestion for reducing the amount of time would be to get some authoritative inbound links to your site, and especially to your new pages.
Thanks for your welcome and your reply.
I guess it makes sense that perhaps I added this content too quickly. It just seems strange that the pages are there in the index but are not returned under any circumstances. Google simply says it has no results at all when I search for the title of the pages.
Anyway, I'll take your advice and keep an eye on these pages.
- David.
When I search for inurl:mysite, I get 177 results of which only 4 are listed (my home page and one other plus 2 from other sites). The remaining 173 are omitted as being "very similar."
I'm not sure I understand the reason for this. Is Google saying the content on my other pages is too similar to my home page? If so, I'm confused since the other pages are genuinely different and all play an honest part in the visitor experience.
Grateful for any pointers here.
- David.
Can't be sure I haven't made some error in the <head> I guess but not aware of any.
(i.e. when I type the precise page title in as a search request and the message "Your search did not match any documents" is returned)?
