problem indexing new site

[kate_sz]

hi.

Two weeks ago we created an independent (as opposed to mass-media driven) site about our city (let's call our service www.somecity.tld - I read it's not allowed to post links here...). It's going very nicely - we have about two dozens stories per day and people like it so far.

Here's the problem: while part of our content is original, part of it is copy&pasted from other news services (in a legal way, btw). While we always give credits, we can't always place a direct link to the article, mainly because quite a few of those sources have pay-per-view policies regarding their archives (news are not accessible to users after several days). What would you do in such cases in order to not be penalized by google?
* leave it as it is (regular text for source).
* link to the homepage of the source?
* link directly to the article, even if it's going to disappear after a few days?

Another thing: we started on Jan 6. Around Jan 17 I added a google sitemap - it had 235 entries (we had ~180 articles back then). Right now we have 314 submitted URL. Until yesterday (I think), query "www.somecity.tld site:www.somecity.tld" showed only homepage from Jan. 9. Right now there is a "Jan 21" next to the title and cached version is from Jan 18.
Is it "normal" that it's not showing other pages after two weeks? If not, could it be that we're penalized for "scraping" content from other sites (as I've said, we're doing it in a "nice" way, but bots don't have to know about it...).

thanks in advance for your advice,
Kate, Krakow, Poland

[muszek]

Not that I'm very experienced in thise field, but it takes some time for google to index your site.

As for the to-link-or-not-to-link strategy - I really don't know and I'm curious myself.

[ashear]

This generally points to a lack of in-bound links to build credability. I would suggest partnering with a few other local sites and get them to link to you.

You will slowly start to see the pages appear and gain traction. Measure your index size by site:www.mysite.com etc.

Your home page most likely does not have enough power to make your inner pages important as of yet.

Or it could be a dynamic site with way too many attributes, can you provide examples of your URL stucture?

[kate_sz]

ashear:
Thanks for you reply, it was informative. we're about to start working on inbound links - up till now content creation and organization of the whole site was more important (we had to spend some time figuring stuff out).
As for URLs, they're all right, they're in a domain.tld/article-keywords-in-a-human-readable-fashion

Now, the more important topic of my first post was this dilemma about linking to "temporary" sources (pages that we cut&paste content from that we can't really directly link to, because they disappear after few days/weeks behind a pay-for-our-archives firewall - please refer to the first post for details). What would you guys do in such a case?

[jimbeetle]

If I need to give a credit and I know the specific page is going to go behind closed doors I simply link to the home page of the site.

[kate_sz]

Just a little more about links: almost everything (apart from forum threads, which are in domain.tld/node/id format - still "simple urls", but not keyword-orientated). The only robot-accessible dynamic part of our site are pagination pages (pages listing content that's off the front page) - they're in a domain.tld/node?page=$page_number format. That's the way it's been implemented in the current version in Drupal (and we'd rather not mess with the code).