Google not indexing some pages after three months

[term099]

Hello.

I have a strange problem with a website. I have submitted it to google about a year ago - One or two months later, pages started to appear in google. I have also submitted a sitemap to google, and update it every month or so. The website is a dynamic website and content is added often. I was recently checking for specific pages with google to see how they rank. The problem I found was that a lot of pages are not indexed in google, even if there are links to them from other pages and they are listed in the sitemap.

<snip>

The above page is linked from the following page:

<snip>

and this page is listed in google. The first page though is not. This page was added about 3 months ago. Is it possible that google has not indexed it yet?

Thanks a lot

[edited by: engine at 5:22 pm (utc) on May 30, 2008]
[edit reason] No specific site links, thanks [/edit]

[tedster]

If a page is not displayed, then it's not in the index. Can you see from your server logs if googlebot has at least spidered the missing page? Sometimes a page gets spidered but Google decides not to include it in the index. And sometimes the spider has not found the page - two different situations.

[term099]

I am not sure if google has spidered the given page but I will check. Any reason as to why google might decide not to include a page?

[dickbaker]

I had the same problem with a new page that went six weeks without being indexed. I couldn't see anything wrong with the page. What was even more unusual was that the new sub-pages it linked to were being indexed and were showing up in the rankings.

Per the suggestion of someone on this forum, I did a 301 on the page and directed it to a new page with a slightly different file name. The new page was in the index in a week or so.

[wanderingmind]

I have a site where Google has indexed thousand of pages, but inexplicably leave out a page suddenly forever. Never indexing it.

If I remove the page, and create a new page with the same content, sometimes its indexed within the hour.

[vero]

I have a similar situation with some of my pages. They've been spidered, but when I check my logs there are lots of search referrers from Yahoo, MSN, etc, but none from Google. They have unique content, relevant, not spammy, all that.
I will try renaming and doing a 301 redirect. Thanks for the idea.

[cabowabo]

Check your Webmaster Tools account. If the page has never been indexed get a link from your home page to the page in question, do a blog post and get a few other links to it too. That should at least get Google to index the page. You can handle the ranking portion from there.

[wanderingmind]

In my case, there has always been a link to the unindexed page from the homepage.

All other urls linked to from the homepage are indexed except one. This has happened before too for me, though very rarely.

Never understood why. If I just rename that url as something else, it would get indexed. But I don't do it just to see what would happen.

[term099]

My problem with renaming pages so that google will index them is that there are too many pages to do and it will take a lot of effort. New pages are added almost every day and keeping track of this would be impossible. It is really a big problem!

I have decided to add code that will track visits from google to individual pages. If I see something interesting I will let you know...