Why isn't Google picking up my pages?

Here's the deal - New site that's been live for about 2 months now. 3700+ pages. Left it alone for the first 3 weeks or so, hoping that Google would naturally index the pages. When it didn't, I created a sitemap and submitted it. It still hasn't helped. Depending on what DC I check, anywhere from 2-15 pages have been indexed, and I've been racking my brain to figure out why G isn't picking up the rest of the pages.

Can someone take a look at www.seating-info.com and see what might be causing the problem? Strangely, according to my server logs, Googlebot is going through all 3700 pages, and most of my traffic is coming from Google, so I can't understand why it's not indexing the pages. Thanks!

 

hi, i'm having same problem. my site civilserviceindia com is also not preforming

 

My personal experience has been a bit bad with .info domains. Backlinks is the key ..... get some from good PR pages.

 

I have had good success with .info's, you just need to have backlinks to the site link any other domain. Build them up, maybe even try to get some higher PR page linking to your site. Make sure they have like content and you will do fine.

 

It's actually a .com, but I have a .info domain with 12K indexed pages, so I don't think it really matters the extension of a site..

The strange thing is that Google isn't reporting ANY pages for my site today (on any datacenters!) I think I might pull the sitemap (it obviously isn't working, since I updated the sitemap, it went from 15 pages, to 2 pages, now to 0!), work on getting more backlinks, and see if anything changes.

 

Where does your content come from? Do you have unique meta and title data on each page?

 

The sitemap is not what is causing google not to index your pages
Google is crawling your site so that's fine, you have nothing to add other than more links. be patient

 

fully agree, more backlinks, content, quality backlinks and patience,
Merry xmas

 

I have a 6 week old site.First page indexed after 2 days (thanx DP) but it is only now beginning to index my other pages.Got to agree with vulcano and the others.

 

Same problem, only 400 of 3000 pages indexed. It looks like Google stopped indexing entire sites in the summer.

The seem to do a % now. for example, 20% of a site first 6 months. 10% of a site next 3 months. etc. sucks I know, but what can we do. Trick is to build sites wide and not as deep.

 

Just thinking about what you say ..........it makes sense to me.They seem to index pages quicker when they are only 1 or 2 deep.

 

Yes Google's rule is for everypage to be accessed within 2 clicks of the root. Now I had some pages that were 3 & 4 clicks away which Google Sitemap stats wouldnt look at, as soon as moved then into a 1 & 2 click bounch the Sitemap started listing all those pages.

I also noticed that if I dont add any pages to my site (which gives me no need to resubmit my sitemap to Google) that my site removes itself from my Sitemap Account and I need to re-verify and submit again. I have calculated that this happens to me when I am not active for 5 days in my Google account but if I add a page say every day or 2 days and resubmit my sitemap to Google then my stats are filled with information.

Try and follow http://sitemaps.blogspot.com/ as they do post some helpful tips but also read http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/docs/en/about.html and you might find something that could trigger your pages being looked at.

 

Well, things have taken a turn for the better.. I spent some time gathering backlinks after reading this thread, but I don't think many of those have gone live yet. I removed the sitemap, as I had a nagging feeling that this was causing more problems than anything else. I also changed the titles for all of the pages - Before it had the domain name and then the description, and I reversed the order, as I was worried G would look at this as duplicate info.

And over the past 4 days, Google seems to have woken up - Doing a "site:www.domain.com" is now showing 153 pages. Before it was showing 2 pages, and originally it was showing 15 pages. So I'm not sure what's going on, but I'll take it. I've since moved some of my 2nd-level links to the main page, in an effort of getting some of my deeper links discovered and indexed.

The strange part is that both DP's Keyword Tracker and McDar's tool are showing 0 pages indexed (on any DC), but I can see it plain as day myself. So who knows what the heck is going on.

 

Glad to see things are turning around, keep on getting links and be patient, google takes time. MSN on the other hand is pretty fast.

 

The sitemap will only hurt your site if it is in an invalid format (non-encoded URLs, non-UTF-8 characters, using long query strings like PHPSESSID) or if it contains pages that return a 404 status (broken links to your page).

Sitemaps have helped me in times of deep-linked pages on many occasions.

The best advice I've seen has been to build quality, relevant links from websites that compliment what you offer your users. Even Google says... build for your visitors... this is what they try to judge you on and makes the most sense... why would they refer searchers to sites that didn't provide a pleasant experience?

Add a search, use RSS, setup a members-only area... not all of these will apply to your site, but all this and more helps to improve a users experience on your site.

 

Glad to hear the news.

Just keep adding rich content and updating your sitemap for every new page added and backlinks, MSN should bring you some good traffic while you wait for Google.

Dont worry about what DP's Keyword Tracker and McDar's tool say, Google still needs to do more work on your site which takes time.

 

I have noticed that it sometimes takes quite a while to get a large site indexed on G. Deeplinks to your site are a must. The suggestion above of building a site wide instead of deep is good. Having all your pages as few clicks away from the homepage as possible is good. I also notice that when I went to my home state (NC) and followed through to the venues that many of the end pages were showing no data. Only the template. Because for the most part these pages have almost the same exact content aside from the venue location name that it is possible that G "may" see these as duplicate content, though I am not absolutely certain.

 

thanks! your information was quite useful! n the link was very handy!