No results searching for exact snippet of text

[driller41]

If I take a snippet of text - 30 words say, from the top of an inner page of my site and search for it in Google I get no results - zero.

When I search on the same snippet in Yahoo I get the page on my website returned.

So the page is being indeved properly by Yahoo and therefore I imagine Google must also be indexing correctly - but no results.

I was under the impression that a piece of unique text should be returned by a search engine, is this a ban or a lack of pagerank or something else?

Your comments would be appreciated.

[Receptional Andy]

Hi driller41.

Are you searching for the words as a phrase (i.e. within quotes)? If so, Google's handling of punctuation within searches sometimes returns no results for long phrase searches, even though the words themselves are indexed - restricting searches to sentences without punctuation is a workaround.

In any case, the first thing to do is check if the page is indeed indexed, using the search syntax below:

site:www.example.com/page.htm

If the URL is returned, then it has made it into the index.

Note, however, that Google does not always fully index certain pages (usually those deemed of low quality) and so while the page is available, many of the words may have been skipped during the indexing process. This saves them processing time on pages that they believe are unlikely to be relevant to many searches.

You can verify whether words on the page are actually indexed using the syntax below:

site:www.example.com/page.htm "my phrase"

[driller41]

Hi, yep the internal pages pass those two tests so the pages are indexed, I guess the pages need more linkjuice then?

[Receptional Andy]

Whether the page needs "more" depends on whether it is performing below expectation generally - as mentioned, phrase-based searching can be a bit quirky and doesn't necessarily indicate a problem.

You could try searching for 3 or four words from the title to get a quick gauge of performance. You can also have a quick overview of whether the page is likely to be supplemental by seeing if it absent from results for the site: punctuation hacks, e.g.

site:www.example.com/*

[driller41]

Many thanks, that is really useful, the titles do not come up so I believe it is lack of incoming links, I am thinking of submitting the pages to some article directories and seeing if it helpd.

[Robert Charlton]

I am thinking of submitting the pages to some article directories and seeing if it helpd.

If I'm understanding you correctly... that you're going to publish the content of your page in an article directory in order to get an inbound link to your page... I think that's a terrible idea.

The article directory is more likely to have more PageRank than your relatively isolated page, and the version of the article in the article directory will most likely end up appearing in Google instead of your page, as your page would get filtered out as dupe content.

I would never submit content on my site for publication elsewhere.

I might revise it substantially (and I do mean substantially) and send a different version somewhere else if I got a good link from it that linked back to me, but I'd keep the best version for my own site. By "revise" in this case, I mean change it so much that it's a completely different article on the same subject.