Google indexing everything BUT the most important pages

[teso]

Hi - I am using Joomla for my site. Over the last few weeks, Google has been indexing my site (fairly new site)...It looks like it has indexed all of my pages (small site) except the 5 I most want it to index. These are pages that are not listed in a visible joomla menu on the front page or other pages, but they are shown as manually created html links. Additionally, Google seems to be indexing every single forum topic, which is fine with me, but I was hoping it would hit the key feature pages first. The key pages do have a lot of links on them, but these are necessary for the content references and not an attempt to overload links.

Here is one of the key featured pages as an example:
< no personal links please >

You'll notice the "Topics" side menu (html links, not a joomla menu) includes the other 4 key pages, which can also be found on the homepage.

Why would these pages not index? Is this common or am I having issues because of the joomla site format?

Thank you for any help!

[edited by: tedster at 3:28 pm (utc) on Mar. 4, 2009]

[tedster]

Hello teso, and welcome to the forums.

Assuming your html has no fatal errors, a link from the home page usually gets an internal pages into the index. How new are these pages? Have you seen googlebot spider them?

[teso]

Thanks tedster - Google webmaster tools shows 0 errors for URLs in sitemap and 0 errors for unreachable urls. How would I be able to tell the specific urls googlebot spidered? I can see the high-level (hits + robot.txt hits) stats in Awstats on cpanel and can't tell withing google analytics.

Thanks.

[edited by: tedster at 6:35 pm (utc) on Mar. 4, 2009]

[particleman]

I'm going to throw out a few suggestions without seeing your site. But this is what I would do in your situation:

1. Are these pages that aren't indexed linked to by other pages (internal links). Linking back to these pages from other ones in your site is a great way to signal google that the page is relevant. As typically with any site the home page is the most linked to, usually followed by the navigation links.

2. I just read your site is fairly new. It can take a while for google to fully index your site.

3. search for googlebot in your raw logs (will be available from your host) and see what pages they are crawling.

[pbaddock]

you need links to the pages you want to promote, both internal links and external links. New site, then Google has little idea on what pages are more important than others unless they have a greater proportion of links to them, from important pages themselves, closer to the base URL (homepage).

So .. link from your homepage to the most important pages on your site, like top level catagory pages.

[Demaestro]

Are you passing Google a Google sitemap?

If yes....
Has it grabbed the sitemap?

If yes...
Are those URLs listed in the sitemap?

[teso]

Thank you for your responses. Yes, I have given google a sitemap and it tool the sitemap successfully. I checked my raw logs and it is hitting the Fireboard (for joomla) forum heavily. It has hit all other pages as well (there are only a few other pages besides the 5 I would like it to pick up). Every page has a button-link back to the home page, every page has several links to the other key pages, and the home page links to all of these pages directly as well. I wonder why google focuses so much on the forum topics and misses the key pages, yet hits all the other non-forum pages.

The only thing I don't have are external links outside of my site linking back to these 5 pages. Actually, the only outside links link directly to my home page, so even the indexed non-homepages are not linked to directly from outside sites.

Any more thoughts/ideas will be much appreciated. Thank you.

[Demaestro]

Is the content being loaded VIA Ajax or some other JS?

[teso]

No.