Dramatically Reduced Indexed Pages

[DanCook]

Hi,

I have a side project I work on http://www.silversurferuk.com/ which is a price comparison service. It's been up since the beginning of december and currently i use low cost product specific PPC adwords to get a majority of the traffic.

A month ago I had approx. 10,000 pages indexed in google - whilst this doesn't mean much if they aren't ranked - i was still getting the odd organic click through here and there.

Well in the last couple of weeks I have now 18 pages indexed in google and I only have three guesses to why.

1) I made a couple of one/two page sites to test out how spamming keywords might affect rankings - take for example www.warcraftgold.co.uk. I then made a link to these pages on some of my silversurferuk sites - using a div which fell behind the logo.

2) I made major changes to the site, move the search box changed the layout of pretty much every page.

3) I added a pricewatch with form validation: Oblivion if you view source you can see the validation script that coldfusion creates takes up a lot of space in the header! I wonder whether Google is reading this and not getting to my content any more?

Any advice would be appreciated - thanks, Dan

[drivetowin]

Not sure if it's having any impact but I think whatever you are using to edit your webpages is putting spurious characters in your source code - if you view the source of some of your pages in notepad you get large areas of white space in the source code between blocks of code - I would try to get rid of those if you can - if nothing else they are making your pages larger than they need to be.

[Retail-Therapy]

Hi Dan

have a look at this search
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=silversurferuk
the second result is possibly at the centre of your problems, the error.cfm page returns a 200 OK header, whereas it should be returning a 500 Internal Server Error header.

[DanCook]

http://www.silversurferuk.com/error.cfm

This is a static page, which I created for use on another thread - discussing an error I was getting from an Amazon feed.

It was indexed only through that thread.

[DanCook]

Originally Posted by kbudden Not sure if it's having any impact but I think whatever you are using to edit your webpages is putting spurious characters in your source code - if you view the source of some of your pages in notepad you get large areas of white space in the source code between blocks of code - I would try to get rid of those if you can - if nothing else they are making your pages larger than they need to be.

It looks like wherever the large white spaces are is where I have coldfusion code, queries etc...- you cannot view coldfusion code in the view source as it is processed by the coldfusion server first - i guess this is just the way it outputs the code when it's done.

[Retail-Therapy]

ah, ok, not the problem then.

[OME]

Originally Posted by DanCook It looks like wherever the large white spaces are is where I have coldfusion code, queries etc...- you cannot view coldfusion code in the view source as it is processed by the coldfusion server first - i guess this is just the way it outputs the code when it's done.

You can have Coldfusion supress that whitespace - it can dramatically reduce the filesize of the page (especially if you have lots of queries in there), plus makes it much easier for google to read. Try cfprocessingdirective or cfsilent - one will be better than the other for you, depending on your code.

[DanCook]

Originally Posted by OME You can have Coldfusion supress that whitespace - it can dramatically reduce the filesize of the page (especially if you have lots of queries in there), plus makes it much easier for google to read. Try cfprocessingdirective or cfsilent - one will be better than the other for you, depending on your code.

Sounds like a good idea to get me started! thanks

I always wondered what the point of cfsilent was - now i think i'll find out.

[Shivaun]

I think you've fallen victim to a problem that is affecting more and more websites.

There are several super-active threads on this at WebmasterWorld:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/34055.htm

And elsewhere:
http://groups.google.com/group/googl...ffd0958bcee7f0

I've been a bit surprised it hasn't popped up here before now.

[DanCook]

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/reincl...request-howto/

I've taken a look at this article, as mentioned in one of those threads - i have submitted a reinclusion request just in case!

[Oron Adam]

I have the same problem, probably related to the big daddy upgrade they went through

[pericom]

Its big daddy.