Google only listing home page

[stevo]

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We have two sites selling historic warbird flights.

The first is indexed by google and all pages are there (using site:www.etc.co.uk).

The second has only ever had the home page indexed since the site was revamped back in November (as was site one!).

I'm tearing my hair out on this, both sites have google sitemaps and site two's sitemap was last read on 15/3/07. They both look pretty good from the robots point of view as far as I can tell with Lynx. Bothe sites have been around for around 12-14 months and were previously indexed ok.

I'll pm the site addresses to you if anyone is in a position to give me any idea s or pointers.

The only difference is that the second site is a .com and the .co.uk forwards to the .com - surely that won't effect thing?

Regards

Steve

[deano6410]

Steve, I have seen this on many occasions.

There are 3 mains reasons IMO as to why this happens:

1) Not enough deep links to your site (try getting links to category pages etc)
2) Over duplication of the template. (What I mean by this is that sites that have sidebars with tons of links, footers with 6 lines of text, identical meta on each page etc... will have a high % of content that is the same on each page. Often, trimming the rubbish from the template, sidebar, menus and footers can sort this, also pay close attention to your meta info.
3) Duplicate content (Are you usinf articles from elsewhere etc?)

Dean

[tbp]

How are you redirecting the .co.uk to the .com? Is the .co.uk just a server alias for the .com, in which case google will see 2 separate domains pointing to the same content, and will think ones a duplicate site. You need to do a proper 301 redirect from the co.uk to the .com.

Have you looked at the server logs to see whats happening when the spider looks at your site? I can't see its a case of the google spider not visting the site, as normally I get constant visits through out the day. I launched a new site last week, and its in google already (with quite a good ranking), and the spider has indexed the whole lot a couple of times already.

One thing you could try, which sounds contradictory, but has worked for people in the past is deleting your google sitemap for the site. This forces the spider to do more work and crawl more, as its got to work out the url's itself, and some people have reported good results with this. You can always put your sitemap back after a couple of days if it makes no difference. I have sort of a similar problem in that I did a major change to the URL structure of my site the other day. I really need google to spider the old url's so it can see the 410 status and remove them from the index. However, its only indexing the new Url's which are in my sitemap, so the old urls arent getting visited and are still in the index.

Also, having an HTML sitemap page on your site can work wonders with google in getting your site spidered. Just call it sitemap.htm and link to it from the main index page of your site, and the spider will make a bee line for it and will start indexing the links in it (include a link for every page in your site). This is a separate thing to a google sitemap in their webmaster tools.

If you want to send me a PM, i`m quite happy to take a look for you and see if I can see what the problem might be.

[Paul Smith]

Hi Steve

Lots of good advice in the posts that preceed my own so I won't repeat what they have all said.

Initially my thoughts too were that some external links to subpages on your site would help the spiders index deeper links. However without actually seeing your setup its impossible to know for sure.

Happy to have a look if you want to post or PM me url's and we'll see what we can do.

Cheers

Paul

[Top banana]

Try doing the site commard with and without the "www." for example:


site:www.website.co.uk
site:website.co.uk

Also are MSN and yahoo indexing beyond the homepage?

[stevo]

Thanks for all the helpful suggestions, I'll take a look at these over the weekend and report back.

I would say that originally he used an "off the shelf" template but it seems OK.

Steve