Google does not show my product pages in searches. Why?

[webdevfv]

We've ranked well for a number of years for our main terms and category and manufacturer group pages rank well but google will not show any of our product pages in the rankings.

Example
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If I take an old product that wasn't massively popular so has few competitors and do a search on the product title I appear No.1 in both bing and yahoo for the product page. Google ranks me No.4 for the category page that has a link to the product page.

If I take a snippet of text in speechmarks google says no such text appears. However, if I copy and paste the complete URL into the search box, google will show it is indexed.

Are my products blacklisted in google?

I've tried sorting out .htaccess as I thought this might be causing issues and have also recently restructured the urls, what concerns me is that results in bing and yahoo are solid but google ranks only a handful of product pages.

Any ideas?

[tedster]

Is this a recent problem for you, or has it been this way for a long time?

[Planet13]

Google ranks me No.4 for the category page that has a link to the product page.

What type of pages rank above your category page? Are they using a similar description to what appears on your product page (which isn't ranked)?

[webdevfv]

Hi tedster - it's been like this for quite some time.

I thought that if it were a technical issue it would have been sorted out through 'fixing' the .htaccess and file structure which we did over the new year.

2 months on and all files are now re-indexed as the new structure but there is still no movement. As I said, bing and yahoo have no problem with listing the individual product pages but google flat out refuses to list something even though it will list the category that links to it.

I count on one hand the product pages it does list.

Is it a penalty? Are my header, footer, navigation and right column having a major impact on the content ratio - I've seen other site's product pages rank well with far less content (sometimes none) on them.

Am I not good enough for google? even when I am the only one to have exactly what is being searched for?

[webdevfv]

planet13

I typed in a search ---- ---- ---- ---- and it came back with just 4 results.

The first 2 were for the actual product pages on 2 different website names that were clones of each other (exactly the same website but with different URLs).

My result was No.3 for a general category page.

The 4th result was to a blog where the product was briefly mentioned but with no direct link, image or anything else.

Results 1 and 2 had none of the information that is on my page - all my product pages have unique content. Not a huge amount but still all written by me.

Our images are also unique and taken by us.

[webdevfv]

Since writing I've tried to make my product pages more 'unique'

= reduced amount of text in 'you may also like' section to just the link name (product name) - used to contain a brief snippet that is also used across the product pages

= reduced amount of code on the page so as to increase the content:code ratio (not by a huge amount but hopefully every little helps)

= removed the snippets of Customer Comments that used to feature on every page. These were 3 shortened quotes chosen at random from the database. As such they will have appeared on a number of product pages but in different combinations

= added the full Customer Comment to the applicable product page - as such only a limited number of pages now feature comments but these are now much larger and unique to the product page. I am contacting previous customers to write reviews and giving them a £5 voucher off their next purchase for their trouble.

I'm hoping these actions will have an effect on allowing my pages to rank but I think I may need to do more... perhaps by reducing the 'power' of my category pages

Will keep you posted