New "main brand" page not indexed - individual model pages are

[dickbaker]

Over a month ago I added some new products to my site. My site already gets lots of Google traffic and ranks very well for hundreds or even thousands of terms.

The page I added to my site is for Acme Widgets. The page is linked to from the site map page, from the online store page, and from a product information page where I list several brands of widgets.

After all this time, Google still doesn't have the Acme_Widgets.html page in the index. However, it has the individual model pages indexed. These are the Acme Model XYZ pages that are linked to from the Acme_Widgets.html page.

I've never had a problem getting pages indexed. This time around it's the reverse of what I've always experienced, in that usually the main brand page gets indexed before the individual model pages.

Everything is white hat, so I can't figure out what the problem is.

Has anyone else had this experience?

[ecmedia]

The indexing has been somewhat spotty lately and for no reason G drops a page or refuses to index/update it. Be patient and hopefully it will get in.

[tedster]

I guess this is a random indexing of the Sitemap urls and it will take some further time to sort out. Are there any other links to the model pages except from the main brand page? I'm assuming they're aren't any.

[Lightguy1]

I have experiences the same thing. G will not index my WIDGET page, but will index all my SUBWIDGET pages. Go figure.

[dickbaker]

Tedster, yes, there are links to the individual model pages from the online store page. But there's also a link to the Acme main page from the online store page. Makes no sense.

I have more products to add to my online store, and I was hoping to get them ranking well in a few months in time for widget season. Now I have my doubts.

[Robert Charlton]

Google still doesn't have the Acme_Widgets.html page in the index...

Not in the index, or simply not showing up before Google stops showing results, at 700 or 900 or 1000? Have you looked into the possibility of a minus 950 for these sitemap pages? Conceivably, they might be inadvertently overoptimized for Acme Widgets.

[dickbaker]

Robert, the page isn't in the index at all. If I do a search for site:www.mysite.com/Acme_Widgets.html, I get a "did not match any documents" result.

I don't think it's over-optimized. Including meta tags, title tags, <h1> tags and page text, the word Acme represents 8.5% of the word count. Two or three word phrases are in the 2-3% range. The page reads naturally.

[outland88]

If the page to date hasn't been indexed I would jerk it and quickly create a new one if you feel there is some problem. To me the problem arises from Google’s erratic or slow crawling patterns. It accepts pages that are very different or distinct from one another. Later when it crawls the additional pages it missed it compares them with what’s already there. As of that point just a few similarities seen to boot pages.

Google now seems more interested in having no duplication within their index more than keeping the entire content from any one domain in their index. So in reality the only content that is totally acceptable to Google now, in my observations, is pages from a book or newspaper that have little or no duplication. On the other hand a commerce site may have strong concept duplication that can run throughout the site. This could even occur when design and text is entirely different on each page but the concept persists.

Bottom line though its really to early to tell. If the page pops up buried in the index that's when the work begins.

[dickbaker]

Outland88, thanks for the reply.

There's absolutely no duplicate content on this page. It's all fresh content I wrote. Yahoo already has the page in its index.

After I created the Acme page and the individual model pages, I wrote an article about widgets and submitted it to two article distribution sites. I'm wondering now if the dozens of links to the page that appeared very quickly is a factor.

[dickbaker]

I didn't want this to drag on, but things are weird. The main Acme page is still not indexed after 40+ days, but the individual model pages are starting to rank. If I do a search for "Acme Model XYX," one of the pages is #27 already. Other pages are in the top 50 for their product names.

I'm wondering if I should rename the main Acme page and put a 301 redirect on the original Acme page (after removing all content), and submit the new page. Since I already have some inbound links for the original page, it would seem like a shame to give them up.

Any opinions on this idea are much appreciated.