Site is indexed, but content isn't

[mppmr6]

My website has been running for a 5 months now and has been submitted to Google and indexed. We are receiving some high quality links as well; however, we are still have trouble ranking for terms and it seems that the content within the site is not being indexed. I have no robots.txt files up on the content I want indexed and have done all on page optimization, just like any other site I have made in the past.

Here's an example of why it seems my content is being overlooked:

If you search for an exact quote from the content, Google won't pick it up. However, if you do a site:www.exampleurl.com "content within the site", the site will show. I know that's because I'm telling Google to find that quote on that site, but why won't it find it when I search for it on the web?

I can search for quotes from my other sites and they will generate, even the content that has only been live for only a few hours.

Any help on this issue would be much appreciated. Thanks!

[tedster]

Welcome to the forums, mppmr6.

if you do a site:www.exampleurl.com "content within the site" the site will show

That fact says that your content actually IS indexed... but it isn't ranking. Recently there have been several other reports about this kind of thing, especially on new sites. Google has become quite complicated when it comes to returning exact content matches and what those complications are in reality is not particularly clear.

When you do the more general search, without using the site:example.com term, does your URL show up anywhere at all - even in the deeper pages?

[tangor]

If one searches for keyword1 keyword2 keyword3 do you want to guess how many sites already have that same set in the same order? And if one is searching for "mary had a little lamb" how many have that as well? Even Bing returns 47,100,000 results. Google is off the charts. The density of pages returning same results is rising and will continue to rise as more websites appear. It is a no-brainer ranking/showing in the serps will become more difficult. Sites are (check logs) generally indexed, but if there's nothing new, might not make the front page because there's nothing new to be displayed.

[lucy24]

That's why you search for literal strings. Change your example to "little lamb whose fleece" and the hit count plummets. Well, for a given definition of "plummet", since this is g### we're talking about. But I can pull random fragments from my own site and wham, there I am. And I'm not talking about fragments containing words like "morphophonetic" (not -phonemic) that are already uncommon enough. Any quirk of wording* will do.


* 931 google hits using exact-phrase. In a few hours it will be 932.

[mppmr6]

@tedster Won't show up for the first 150 pages when I do more general searches.

@tangor I'm picking exact quotes out of the site that would unlikely be elsewhere, such as direct quotes from company personnel that include the name. So I would have to say there's something new being displayed. If I pick similar quotes out of other sites I own they generate no problem.

[tedster]

This sounds like something we used to see back in the days of the Supplemental Index - a sort of "incompletely indexed" situation. On the face of it, I'd guess that the site has not yet established a strong enough backlink situation and it may suffer from low authority/trust.

Do you have many backlnks that you haven't arranged somehow? That is to say, are there other sites, or even social media interactions, where people are voluntarily choosing to talk about your business?

[Robert Charlton]

Many of these "Supplemental" results were pages that were essentially dupe content... or pages with content that wasn't dupe, but had dupe titles, bad backlinking, etc. This kept them from rising sufficiently above the background noise to be shown on normal web searches.

If you search for an exact quote from the content, Google won't pick it up. However, if you do a site:www.exampleurl.com "content within the site", the site will show.

The site: operator helps separate a site from the rest of the billions of pages on the web enough that Google's got a mucher smaller set to examine.

When I read the first post, it sounded to me like a case of dupe content and/or insufficient inbound linking. I'm seeing this kind of thing happening also on sites with a lot of internal dupe content.

I'm picking exact quotes out of the site that would unlikely be elsewhere, such as direct quotes from company personnel that include the name.

Do these particular site searches, if quoted, show much internal duplication? If not, then I'd go with the inadequate or untrusted backlinks.

[mppmr6]

Thanks for the input Robert. I'll look into what title tags have been used and give everyone an update.

[Robert Charlton]

Make sure you look at more than just title elements. You should be able to see internal dupe content in a site: search, and too much internal duping is shooting a lot of sites down.

On a site I'm checking out right now, a site: search for a 4-word phrase (for which an article on the domain doesn't rank at all in a general search but should really be at the top) returns 190,000 pages. Doing a site: search for a unique 10-word exact quote from the same article (searched in quotes) returns 1,800 dupes of this page.

This can be due to anything from lack of canonicalization to faceted navigation of various kinds, with the same page content returned on many different urls.

I'm relatively sure the duping has caused Google to Pandalize the site.

[Robert Charlton]

And a PS to the above... duplicate titles can be either...

a) a symptom of dupe issues resulting from faceted navigation or faulty canonicalization...
b) or a sign that someone hasn't taken care to create unique titles...
c) or a combination of (a) and (b).