Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I've just started working on a site over the last month or so and am having a few problems figuring out what is going on with indexing pages coming from my home page, so any help would be greatly appreciated.
Some background info first:
My Home Page has a PR of 5 and is ranked highly for some very competitive phrases (talking millions of searches each month)
We've submitted an xml sitemap according to the spec google set out
The site's about 2 years old
We don't really have any duplicate content on any of our pages
The links from our home page (href links) that I'm interested in have a javascript function that hides them aso that at the moment they show (as examples):
placename1 widgets, placename 2 widgets
If someone then clicks on placename1 widgets there is a fade affect which then shows the 'sub menu':
placenameA widgets, placenameB widgets.
I'm fairly certain that the above way of showing the links isn't the problem - all the links are there in the source code and I'm getting good results on a lot of them...
A lot of my inner pages are doing really well, getting high ranked phrases - i.e. placename1 widgets on first / second page of google.co.uk and maybe 4 / 5 page google.com without any external links at all (yet) and no work on the content yet either - these are really competitive phrases too.
(We've been doing a lot of PPC over the last year in particular, but we're now looking to the seo and I feel really confident of getting some pretty stellar positions for a lot fo the pages)
So, now onto the problems:
1) Some of my pages linked from the home page aren't being indexed at all. These pages in many cases are older than pages which are being indexed using the same linking method. Not only are they linked from the PR5 home page, but also from the PR4 sitemap and also in many cases from another internal PR 3 / 4 internal page.
2) Some of my pages are being indexed, but the PR bar on Google Toolbar shows as grey with No Information Available, but more worrying than this is that in Google Webmaster Tools it's not registering any backlinks at all (I've performed searches on google for some unique phrases in the pages and the pages are listed).
So, any ideas? I've used some really good sources in the past to build links into other sites and have achieved great results and now we're launching into an seo 'phase' I'd like to do the same again - is it worth it with these pages? Should I maybe just build some new pages to do exactly the same thing as these pages, (with slightly different urls), get rid of the old page links and link these new pages ot my home page before I proceed? (If I did this so you think I'd have to use slightly different anchor text even if the url was different?)
Many thanks!
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 5:32 pm (utc) on Dec. 2, 2008]
Some of my pages linked from the home page aren't being indexed at all
To me, Google seems almost over-eager to index content. If you're linking from a well-ranked homepage and not getting the linked content indexed it would be a concern. How much of a concern depends on the crawling cycle for your pages, and how quickly content gets indexed. How old is the content, and how frequently do you expect comparable content to become searchable?
Some of my pages are being indexed, but the PR bar on Google Toolbar shows as grey with No Information Available, but more worrying than this is that in Google Webmaster Tools it's not registering any backlinks at all
Personally, I pay all but zero attention to toolbar PageRank, and I take WMT data with a healthy pinch of salt. I don't think these are good measures of whether there is a problem with a page. But if pages don't perform to expectations, then you will need to do something to make sure they do. That may be performance for particular keywords, visitors, sales etc.
Should I maybe just build some new pages to do exactly the same thing as these pages, (with slightly different urls), get rid of the old page links...
There's a chance that this might be the quickest way for you to get results, but at the same time ditching the old pages might mean you ignore a deeper problem - and perhaps increase the chances of the same happening again.
If you don't see the links as html neither will google. java is ignored.
You mention building links in the past, use the link command + the keyword in a regular Google search, if the command returns no incoming links that keyword is blocked for your site.
Ignore toolbar pagerank, ignore pagerank all together actually, focus on incoming traffic figures from search engines for better results.
edit: You asked "Should I maybe just build some new pages to do exactly the same thing as these pages, (with slightly different urls), get rid of the old page links..." If you go that route copy the pages verbatim to new pages with different url's and then promptly block the old pages with robots.txt and a removal request in GWT. Expect some time before all changes are finalized, several weeks at least.
[edited by: JS_Harris at 4:40 am (utc) on Dec. 3, 2008]
First of all, many thanks for coming back to me...
Andy - Some of the content which isn't being indexed is around 4 months old, but I have other pages linking from exactly the same 'area' (homepage) which have been indexed and are ranking well within a week or so of uploading. I'm pretty worried about this - there doesn't seem to be any pattern to this at all and I'd say this and the grey bar problem are affecting a reasonably large percentage of the pages linking form the home page (say 30 - 40%). However, the other pages that are linking form the home page and are being indexed are doing really really well and my home page is getting really good listings for very very hard-to-achieve phrases - so I don't think that Google is penalising my site.
Unfortunately, some of these pages that are being 'ignored' are really important to us for our seo strategy...
If I was to take down the old pages / use robots.txt and a removal request and upload new pages, should I use different anchor text ion the new links or will the old anchore text linking to a different url suffice?
JS Harris - no keywords I'm interested in are blocked for the site - if i try searching for these pages using KWs that I would expect them to rank under then I usually find other pages from my site (although they are far down the rankings because they're not amazingly relevant pages to those phrases).
Everyone - as far as the links go they're showing on the source as href="/placename1/placenameA-widgets.php" - I don't this is causing any negative affects as most of the pages are being indexed correctly - anyone else have any thoughts on this?
How have you determined that some pages aren't indexed? Have you searched for exact unique text strings on these?
href="/placename1/placenameA-widgets.php"
This url structure suggests that if you've got a lot of placenames, and if you could see all of your links at once, you'd see that you've got a lot of links on your homepage... probably more than the 100 maximum that Google recommends. It also suggests that much of your content might be templated, with perhaps only the placename changing.
It's possible that a combination of less than ideal PageRank distribution in combination with highly templated content would cause Google to place these in its current version of the Supplemental index, whatever that might be.
Also, it's likely that the anchor text of those many links on your home page are in the form...
PlacenameA Widgets
PlacenameB Widgets
PlacenameC Widgets
etc...
The repetition of Widgets in a situation like this has been reported as the source of problems on some sites. I've also seen sites where the repetition of "widgets" causes no apparent problems. Effectively, though, all those buried links create what's being called a "mega menu". I suggest that you take a look at this thread to see whether any of the problems discussed apply....
The "Mega Menu" Problem and Google Rankings
[webmasterworld.com...]
Link building to the pages you want to rank certainly should help. I'm not quite sure, though, I understand the phrasing of your questions here...
Should I maybe just build some new pages to do exactly the same thing as these pages, (with slightly different urls), get rid of the old page links and link these new pages ot my home page before I proceed? (If I did this so you think I'd have to use slightly different anchor text even if the url was different?)
