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Googlebot knocks on the front page of the site every two weeks or so but never explores further.
Not only that, Google's SERPs are not showing the titles or other meta tag information, just the URLs. I am mystified by all of this and hope someone might help and that my mistakes, if any, are an object-lesson for others.
The pages are content-rich and accessible through plain <a href> links through a simple hierarchy beginning on the home page. They were also unique - at least as far as the rest of the web was concerned. Sadly, I kept multiple copies of each page on my site because the pages must be reached in several places in the hierarchy of the site. Obviously, having duplicate content was a no-no, but from what I have read, Google normally just randomly eliminates duplicates and does not take out the results altogether.
Other possible clues:
- All pages were in PHP and had the .php ending. I have since switched this to .html to see if it would help. It hasn't so far.
- Sometime before the time of the Google drop, I changed the site's URL altogether. This was painful. The Yahoo and DMOZ listings needed to be changed, which happened quickly. Interestingly, after six months, Google's own directory listings obtained from DMOZ do not reflect the change.
- I have a .us domain suffix.
- The domain has a unique IP address.
- Even though my home page of www.mysite.us shows up in SERPs with no title and description, when doing a search for the term "mysite.us", the mysite.us page (with no www. prefix) comes up with a title and description.
- There are several hundred outside links to my site, including some pages inside the site, so Google knows they exist even if it doesn't get them from my home page.
I have written Google and they counsel patience and assure me that I have not been banned from Google (as evidenced by a few pages being listed). But six months of waiting indicates to me that something is very, very seriously wrong.
Does anyone have any idea why this is happening and how it might be remedied?
Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]!
>SERPs are not showing the titles or other meta tag information, just the URLs
This typically means that they have found links to those pages, but have not yet spidered the pages.
Since your pages were previously indexed, it sounds like they "forgot" what was on them for some reason.
The first thing I would check on a site with these symptoms is to make sure your robots.txt file is valid. If Google is disallowed from indexing a site, it may still list some pages -- but as URL-only listings based on incoming links only.
Jim
<added> See also [webmasterworld.com...] </added>
User-agent: psbot
Disallow: /
Also, no other major search engine is choking on my site.
Any other possibilities are most welcome.
