Google only seeing index page

[ed42]

We have started a new film site site (I know the web really needs another one!) and were having a bit of trouble with Google spidering the site. We come top of the pile when you search for <our exact name>, but it only finds the index.

We have about 600 pages online, but google dosnt see any of them. Weve been going since the start of November and so far I have-
Made a google sitemap and submitted it
Registred the site with Google.
I have loads of links (that work) on all of the pages, Ive checked them so I know they work, and their text links not image ones.

Im figuring that there is either a problem with the site, or the way the pages are laid out. Can somebody help!

[edited by: tedster at 12:37 am (utc) on Dec. 24, 2005]
[edit reason] no specifics, please [/edit]

[tedster]

Welcome to the forums, ed42.

1. If the site just went live in November, there's a good chance you won't be seen on principal keyword searches for quite a while. You've taken some good steps so far (the sitemap submissin should help spidering) but you didn't mention one important factor -- are there many links from other sites pointing to your pages?

2. Even though Google may not be showing your pages on the search engine, they still may be gathering the information -- check your server logs to see if Googlebot is requesting the deeper pages.

3. Also, it's always a good idea to ensure that your site is spiderable. Some tools you can use are the Xenu link checker and the W3C Validator for HTML [validator.w3.org].

[ed42]

Thanks for the welcome.

I have about ten inbound links to the site from other sites, as well as tons of internal links (menu at the top of the page is the basic main menu) I know this is not a lot at the moment. To be honest I have sent out loads of emails to similar sites, trying to get a link exchange, but no avail. I think its hard if your trying to get people to link to similar content-they dont want to loose their traffic.

My main concern is that when you hit the similar pages/pages from the same site Google comes back with nothing-even though their should be 100s of pages. Im just worried that there is something fundementally wronfg with the site that needs fixing. Is this normal on a new site?

[g1smd]

See Post#12 in this other thread [webmasterworld.com] for more information.

[FromRocky]

Be patience!
This happens to any new sites (3 months or less).

You can find out more from
2 months old site - only main page is indexed
Is it normal? [webmasterworld.com]

It's just the index page shown under normal Google.com for your site but there are 39 pages showing in the test DC 64.233.179.104 . Check it out.

[ed42]

Thanks for the reply, yeah I had a look and its good to see the pages are on there. Can I ask a really dumb question without getting moaned at for being stupid! What is the DC 64.233.179.104 tester? What purpose does it serve? Is it pages that are being lined up to go on the main server?

[g1smd]

Google has more than 60 IP addresses that their servers are spread over. Each IP address has hundreds of invidual machines that can serve results.

Google has several versions of their index spread across their servers. Each time you access google.com you get the results from a random server each time.

Hover your mouse over the cache link to see the IP address that you used this time. Type in the IP address instead of google.com if you want that exact datacentre again at any time.

The IP that you mentioned is not in the normal Google IP rotation, you have to access that server using the actual IP address. That server has a special test index on it, and some of the data there will eventually spread to other datacentres.

[Mister Bogdan]

Hi,

I have the same problem. Before, all of my pages in all of my websites are indexed properly. Now, googlebot see only my main index page...

But... I have about 50 websites, and this is situation for all of them... Also, this sites are online more than 2 years..

There is probably something wrong with googlebot... Or they have new policy...