Google not indexing second-most popular page on site

[stevesixthcity]

Hi everyone,

I am working with an older .asp site that, because of its coding, has been susceptible to malware attacks within the last year or so. As of right now, here's the big problem we are dealing with: Our second-most popular landing page (or what used to be) is no longer being indexed in Google. Even in an "info:www.domain.com" search, a different URL from the site appears, a blank products page.

The weird thing is, this particular page is still being indexed in Bing and Yahoo, so we are getting scant organic traffic. Google is the only area where we are having trouble, and the rest of the site is being indexed just fine.

By any chance, does anyone have any experience with .asp sites and Google indexing issues?

Thank you!

[aristotle]

In Google Search Console, you can submit that page to Crawl --> Fetch as Googlebot.

Wait for the fetch to take place, then check to make sure that it was successful, and got the right code. Then if everything looks okay, you can choose the "submit to index" option.

There's no certainty that this will work, but I think it's worth a try.

[keyplyr]

Make sure there is no duplicate content. That's a common reason why a page is dropped from the *visible* index.

[stevesixthcity]

Thank you for the advice, everyone! I have submitted the fetch request for indexing in the Search Console, so I will update on what happens. As for the duplicate content, that's what I initially looking into, especially with numerous product pages in the .asp setting, but it looks like we might be clear of that.

[JS_Harris]

I see this all the time when a category page with snippets, or even a feed page, ranks ahead of the full article for specific terms. It happens because of duplicate content essentially but it is not a penalty, Google just chooses the "wrong" page. You can remedy that by giving the desired page more exposure in your internal link setup or by getting it more backlinks from other sites. If you don't want your category/tag pages ranking feel free to add a noindex meta tag to them, Google will still pass any rank value through the category/tag pages as usual but they will not longer rank(or compete) against your actual articles.

[martinibuster]

Category pages can logically be the most relevant for the shorter two word phrases, with the longer phrases taken care of by the pages lower down. They're important sections that I would never no-index.

[Robert Charlton]

They're important sections that I would never no-index.

Often, depending on the type of site, category pages are the prime targets. It helps category pages to give them some useful text content. On some sites, I treat this content like short introductory articles.

Category pages generally work best if they are not templated... ie, they contain content unique to the subtopic. When I've optimized very large geo-targeted sites where templating was necessary, I've pushed for as much unique content as I could get.

When the content beneath those category pages is useful and unique, and the site itself is an important resource, Google does indeed rank the categories. They can in fact be the most valuable pages in a site, producing a huge amount of traffic. This varies, of course, and, again, depends upon the nature of your content.

[30K_a_month]

I dont index categories just posts and pages.