Google indexing odd pages

[cazulu3]

Can I direct google to index specific pages of a website?. At present, the pages being indexed don't represent the main activities and content of the site. I subsequently changed the content of those pages to better represent my position and Google changed its indexing to other similar poorly represented pages. I added a sitemap. This didn't help. When searching my website it barely exists in the search results. I thought Google would index my index.htm page for which it isn't. Any suggestions?

[tedster]

Hello cazulu3, and welcome to the forums.

Was that an XML sitemap you added? If it was, did you include the <priority> elements? Also, how new is this site?

[cazulu3]

Hi Tedster,

The sitemap is XML. However, I haven't used a <priority> tag. Will this prioritise indexing for URL's marked within priority tags? if so, should it be positioned in specific areas of the sitemap file?

The site is over a year old

[tedster]

<priority> - optional - The priority of this URL relative to other URLs on your site...lets the search engines know which of your pages you deem most important so they can order the crawl of your pages in the way you would most like.

[google.com...]

That said, it sounds like there may be some other issue going on, too, since the link structure within your site should also telegraph the most important pages to Google. Not seeing your index page is a major concern, although it should be indexed as example.com and not example.com/index.html

See Merging www.example.com/ and www.example.com/index.htm [webmasterworld.com], which is available in the Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com] that is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page.

[cazulu3]

I will have to try the sitemap again and place in some priority tags.

Thanks for the advice.