Google indexing but not storing

[spiritualseo]

I have a strange issue at hand. For the past 6 months one of my ecommerce sites hosted on IIS servers is not ranking in Google. It's ranking fine in yahoo and fairly high for competitive keywords. But not a single page is ranking in Google even for low competitive keywords.

A site search indicates that Google has crawled all pages of the site but when I do a quoted search of the content on these pages, Google shows no results.

It's like Google has indexed the page but when I take some content out of that page and do an exact search using "quotes" I do not find the page showing up. It shows no results found.

Hope I made sense.

My question is, why is this happening? Why is google indexing the page but not storing the content. Is this some kind of a penalty? Or has it got something to do with the way my server is set. I did find a no-store, no-cache in the server header check. But I thought these were purely for browsers and not for search engines.

Please help!

[bwnbwn]

no-store, no-cache in the server header resarching this shouldn't be the problem.
Can you give some more info on the site.
age
links
etc to be able to help ya a little more.

[g1smd]

What do you get for:

site:www.example.com

and for

site:example.com -inurl:www

searches?

[Receptional Andy]

"Supplemental" pages can exhibit this behaviour, where content is partially indexed. In these cases you may be able to find the pages if you search for words in the title. And there can be other algorithmic causes too.

If you include the quoted phrase within a site: search, does your page show up? (i.e. [site:example.com/page "example phrase from the page"])

[spiritualseo]

The site is around 7 months old, has around 129 unique links according to yahoo. Most of these links are to internal pages. One month back I changed the site's URLs from HTTPs to HTTP to see if that helps (All URLs of the site were HTTPs previously). Site search indicates that Google has recognized this change and indexed all http pages.

site:example.com -inurl:www = zero results
site:www.example.com = 500 indexed pages (homepage ranks on top)

The page does show up when I do the following query:

site:example.com/page "example phrase from the page"

But when I do a "domain name keyword" search (without .com) I see the 'contact us page' & one internal page (indented) rank instead of the homepage

With the example.com search the homepage ranks along with the contact us page (indented)

[dailypress]

I have a similar problem on several pages of my website. Some pages show up as indexed but do not appear in the SERPs. My site is also 6-7 months old.

Now I am wondering if the new domain extensions (.me and .asia) can also be a factor, because I have never experienced this with my .com's

Is Google trying to analyze and examine the websites with their new extensions? Or am I getting off topic?

[spiritualseo]

I don't think that could be an issue.. my site's a .com

[bobbarnes]

We're seeing the same issue with a site (.com) that is a few days short of six months old. There are 60 inbound links.

It is only affecting the main page. All pages are cached and all apart from the main page yield results for exact quoted searches.

site:www.example.com
site:example.com -inurl:www

comes back with all pages including main.

The main page has a high ranking in MSN and Yahoo

I've checked all the usual suspects:

www.example.com/index.html redirects to www.example.com
example.com redirects to www.example.com
Unique content
Relavent meta tags

We've been in this situation for 5 of the 6 months the site has been live, with the main page ranking after two weeks for two weeks. I'm a patient person (an essential quality for those that deal with G) but there is a limit ..

[bobbarnes]

Good news, we finally escaped yesterday and the landing page now ranks.

After the last post I'd decided that it was an over optimisation penalty. The site is a city guide where the city name consists of two terms and the domain includes both terms plus the country name eg

www."nice""place""country".com

The aim was to rank highly for "nice place" and "nice place country". One thing that admitedly looked spammy were the headings on the landing page which were all prefixed with the city name. So I had:

nice place introduction
nice place guide
nice place beaches
nice place day trips
nice place images

"nice place" has been removed from these and the density of "nice place" and "nice place country" reduced dramatically. I also redid the title and description.

The only other changes were the addition of about 3 reciprocal links and a reinclusion request.

I have a suspicion that if the city name had been a single term I wouldn't have had a problem.

I suppose it goes to show that patience doesn't always pay off.

For the record "nice place country" is at #3 and "nice place" is at #5 in G. Which is ... hmmmmm ... nice.

[tedster]

Yes - that does sound like over-optimization. Congratulations on recovering from the ranking problem.

For reference, we discussed this issue in both the Minus 950 penalty [webmasterworld.com] and the Mega Menu Problem [webmasterworld.com] threads.