3.5 months and no internal pages indexed

[GillP]

Hi, I'm pretty new to this game and floundering somewhat! I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions as to what it takes to be indexed.
My site was an old one that I never used. Have completely revamped it, put robots text on, joined sitemaps at Google, asked them to crawl faster, and various other things too many to remember.
But I still only have the home page indexed (inherited from the previous very low ranked site content), and that is not indexed with any relevant keywords. It's not just Google - it's not indexed anywhere. MSN appear to have picked up some bits and pieces.
Despite the robots text requesting not to crawl the old web pages, they are still listed by Google as pages to the site.
I feel sure that it's worth something as people visiting do tend to browse around the pages. Is there something else I can do?
Many thanks
Gill

[theBear]

Well first off welcome to WebmasterWorld GillP.

Now comes the question of questions, do you have any links to that site from other sites?

[GillP]

Yes - so far I reckon around 15 that I know of - MSN has me at over 300
And thanks for the welcome!
Gill

[theBear]

Is google visiting any pages of the site other than the home page?

When you changed the site how many pages did you get rid of and are any of the pages that you got rid of the actual targets of the links you know about?

[GillP]

Google appears to know about 2 other pages, (there are 95 in all). The links, bar 2 low level ones, are all relevant to this new site.

[GillP]

Sorry, missed half of that.
I haven't actually deleted any of the old pages - they're still up there. I have just re-worked the index.html and instructed through robots.txt not to cruise the old pages. There were only 6 in total of the old site.
Gill

[theBear]

post data stuff ;-).

[edited by: theBear at 10:35 pm (utc) on Nov. 19, 2006]

[tedster]

Make sure your robots.txt syntax is totally valid and really giving the instruction you want it to. I have seen some really major sites mess up with robots.txt

The old URLs may hang around as "Supplemental Results" for a long time - that should not be an issue to worry about. See this thread for lots more:
Supplemental Results - what exactly are they? [webmasterworld.com]

[theBear]

"I haven't actually deleted any of the old pages - they're still up there. I have just re-worked the index.html and instructed through robots.txt not to cruise the old pages."

Links to any of those pages no longer count, which was the real point of getting an answer to the question.

You'll also want to get external links to internal pages of your site.

[GillP]

Thanks Tedster, I've checked my robots.txt with the Google tool and think it is ok, but will have another look.
I'm not that bothered about the old pages showing - it's irritating that they don't ignore them when I ask them to, but I see from the link you offered that that's asking a lot.
I'm now working on my page links which it looks like have fallen foul of the duplicate content thing.
Hopefully that will help,
Gill

[GillP]

Hmmm - had been wondering whether I should get links to internal pages - will give that some thought.
Neither of the 2 old links went to now defunct pages - just index.html.
All your help has been great -
back to the drawing board .... no matter how much you keep tweaking, there's always something else that has to be done!
Is there ever a time when you can sit back and say - "the bones are there now. I can concentrate on the content"?
Thanks again for the help,
Gill

[GillP]

Just wanted to say thanks!
I used Xenu to sort through all my links. Have changed the duplicates and have, within in a couple of days, started receiving sensible keyword searches from Google. Excellent!
I've just read on here though that /index.html should be merely /
Oh dear, I made them all the other way around. Back to the drawing board then ....
Gill