Strange issue, Page is Cached but content are not in the Index …

[zahirshah]

Hi there,

We have the below very strange issue:

Our home page has been in the Google index (it gets indexed constantly), the cached version is OK … our home page has 1300+ (words) very unique content (created and posted around 3 months ago)

BUT

When we make a search for a line from the body content in inverted commas, .i.e. “a line here”, Google doesn’t show our page and instead it gives error that “your search did not match any documents”

We see the Same issue with few of our inner pages also, the rest all pages are OK and the content are indexed when we make an inverted commas search. The rankings of the none-indexed content pages have been dropped also, the pages of the indexed content are ranking well ...

So what do you think about this? Can this be some sort of page-based penalty or what? How can we get our content indexed? Please guide me …

*URL of my website can be sent to you in a pm message, please let me know if you need to analyze it*

Thank you so much in advance!

[tedster]

The only real way to know if a page is in the index (somewhere, on some version of the index) is if you get traffic from Google search. Next to that, you can do a search for the exact URL, and that's pretty good, at least for whatever data center your search gets sent to. The available data is different from one data center to another, however.

Quoted text strings are no longer a true indication of whether the URL is indexed, and neither is the presence or absence of a "cached" link.

[g1smd]

Make sure of the usual suspects:
- HTTP response code "200 OK",
- robots.txt disallow rules,
- meta robots noindex here, or
- meta robots nofollow on pages that link here, and
- no real links to this page from elsewhere.

[zahirshah]

Hi tedster,

Thanks for your response!

The page is in the index of course, we are getting traffic also and the home page is ranking well on quite a lot of keywords also (but it was much better when we were having the old copy which were in the indexed around 3 months ago), we created new copy for the home page and since that the rankings seem getting down. So was just wondering why Google doesn’t show our website when we make an inverted commas search for a line.

So you suggest that we shouldn't care about the inverted commas search if the page is in the indexed and getting traffic? what could be the reasons of not showing any result when the content/copy is searched?

Thanks for your support!

[tedster]

This is an issue that shows up more and more lately - and I think it's related to the way Google indexes and compresses content. The fact is that Google is not like text string search (as in MS Word for example). Document contents are not stored that way to search results purposes.

Instead they are sharded into semantic phrases and the results of that semantic analysis are coded/tagged - then those coded tags are what is stored and retrieved. They call it "phrase-based indexing" and makes a great way to compress the huge pile of data they crawl - see our discussion of six patents Google filed [webmasterworld.com] in 2006.

The important point is that only search queries that are actually made by end users really matter for traffic. When some exact quote from your page doesn't retrieve your page, it can be unsettling - but it doesn't really impact traffic. It just upsets your instincts about how search "should" work.

[zahirshah]

Well, its making me quite frustrated that how can we make it indexed as 95% page's content are fine, just 5% has this issue :( ... just thinking if this can be done if we redesign our website (like to have new codes etc etc) ?

[edited by: tedster at 4:30 pm (utc) on Jul 14, 2011]