Well indexed, not ranked : Over 100K pages indexed, no traffic

[atog33k]

Hi folks,

I have a job board in the UK that is well indexed : I got over 100K pages indexed on Google, but only a 100 of these pages are in the first 10 pages of results.
I have no issue in the webmaster tool, no warning. A lot of pages that don't rank have pagerank (>2). But they don't show up in results. Even when I'm searching for an entire sentence, I don't show up, but the page is indexed and in Google cache!

I don't understand why I do not rank in search results.

If someone has ever experienced this please give me your feedback.

Thanks for all your comments...

[speedshopping]

just bumping this as I have got similar problems with 12k pages that were indexed very quickly in Google, showed good ranking for a few "hours" then all have completely disappeared and still not showing anywhere 5 days later.

I can find them using site: operator though.

[tedster]

pagerank (>2). Even when I'm searching for an entire sentence, I don't show up, but the page is indexed

We've been hearing more reports of this in recent weeks - and I'm not sure why it would be the case I wonder if it's related to preparing for Caffeine. It certainly is disturbing when it happens.

[CainIV]

I am too trying to get to the bottom of this one. See it on a website I work with. Will let you know if I find out more. I suspect tedster is right, this likely has something to do with the preparation for Caffeine.

[gn_wendy]

I can confirm issues on two very large sites. - and it's hurting traffic.

[paladin]

I've seen this go both ways during the last week or so - sites getting removed from SERPS and another getting back in.

Its only a small sample, but it seems the site that got back was the one with a lot of unique content.

[dailypress]

Even when I'm searching for an entire sentence, I don't show up, but the page is indexed

Same here on several of my sites.

[SEOPTI]

Long tail sites generally seem to have problems at the moment. With smaller sites less than 1000 URLs I don't see those problems.

[paladin]

Long tail sites generally seem to have problems at the moment.

I think the issue is that long tail sites usually don't have as much unique content, other thenthe keyword itself

[gn_wendy]

I think the issue is that long tail sites usually don't have as much unique content, other thenthe keyword itself

I am looking at the numbers for a longtail site right now. Unique content is not the problem... there isn't even similar content on a majority of the pages.

Apart from pages from the same category and subcategory, which share similar titles, headings and links, the only common element is the code, which is around 97-99% identical for all longtail pages, but that was never an issue before. Could it be now? Are there any other hypothesis?

[paladin]

gn_wendy,
How much text content do you have on those pages?

[gn_wendy]

Varies from page to page.

Lowest is around 350 words and a text/code ratio of 6.5%

The highs are upward of 700 words and t/c 7.8%

On average I would say it hits 450-550 words.

[SEOPTI]

What comes into mind, check your supplementals at search.aol. With my long tail sites I see the AOL exported URLs are dropping since September big time.

[ogletree]

It is rare for a site that big to have much unique content. The best thing you can do is work on only showing Google unique content. Forums are bad about lots of pages with single short posts. Also it is very common for their to be a lot of dup content because of your forum software and internal linking. You need to look at your site like google does. If they see tons of pages that look alike and pages that have less than 15 words then you need to make some changes. WebmasterWorld has tons of pages but they rank for everything. I'm sure the number of links and quality of links you have can be an issue as well. The more links and more authority you get the better you will do.