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Am I being penalized for overuse of keywords in urls?

Google search results go only to main page

         

Ceyx

9:16 am on Jan 28, 2007 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I created a new website for an old domain and submitted it to Google several months ago. Although Google has indexed all of the pages, it is returning search results only to the main page (index.htm). It will not return a result from any other page even when an exact string should match. I am wondering if I am being penalized for using too many subdirectories and lots of keywords in the urls of both the subdirectories and their pages.
I've had no problem getting #1 placement for keyphrases on many of my other sites. Yahoo and MSN are returning results from the other pages, but not Google. Any advice would be most appreciated! The website is at < edited >
Thanks in advance,
Peter

<Sorry, no specifics.
See Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com]>

[edited by: tedster at 9:21 am (utc) on Jan. 28, 2007]

coopster

2:54 am on Jan 30, 2007 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member



Welcome to WebmasterWorld, Ceyx.

Always a fun one, eh? Although it is an observation that might seem obvious, the question still begs to be answered, ... are you certain the bot isn't being blocked by a robots.txt file? How about pages "higher up" in the directory structure, are they being indexed?

Bewenched

6:16 pm on Jan 30, 2007 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



It does blow my mind that they would filter entirely on the URL. If they dont want the url to count .. then just dont count it. They have to realize that webmasters have to be able to organize their site structure for themselves, I know that with everything in the root of a site it makes it VERY unmanageable so we have to put things into folders and we have to name them things that will make sense to us regardless of google or the customers.

tedster

8:48 pm on Jan 30, 2007 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



several months ago.

Not so long in Google's terms. You might still be building trust, rather than suffering a penalty. It's what we used to call the "sandbox effect".

Filters exist - the Sandbox doesn't. How to build Trust. [webmasterworld.com]

Ceyx

2:21 am on Jan 31, 2007 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



There is no robots.txt blocking the subdirectories and the pages in the subdirectories are indexed by Google, which lists all of them when I query with "site:mydomain.com". I am still only getting results to index.htm and it is in the root directory. Regarding "trust" and filters, I haven't had any problem with other sites using the same words in both the keywords and title tag, and usually no problem with putting relevant keywords in the url. That being said, in this site I did use three keywords in naming each subdirectory, and I also used three keywords in each of the 9 .htm file names. Also, I didn't put an "index.htm" in any of the three subdirectories, and the main index.htm is not in a subdirectory. How long should I wait to change all this?

BTW, I think pagerank and external links coming in are highly overrated. I created a two-page site with only two links from another site of mine coming in and the pages have a "0"
pagerank, yet score incredibly high (#1 out of 1,000,000s) for their subject - with common search queries similar to something as common as, say, for example, "used cars in california".