Town and County pages taking months to index.
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Hi,
At http://www.general-hypnotherapy-register.com/regional-hypnotherapy-directory/ we have a load of town and county pages for all of the hypnotherapists on the site
a) I have checked all of these links and they are spiderable.
b) About a month back I noticed after the site changes, not entirely sure why, but the site was generating rogue pages, eg http://www.general-hypnotherapy-register.com/hypnotherapists/page/5/?town=barnsley instead of http://www.general-hypnotherapy-register.com/hypnotherapists/?town=barnsley
We have added meta no index, no follow to these rogue pages around 4 weeks ago..however these pages still have a google cache date of Oct 4th predating these meta changes
c) There are examples of the pages we do want, indexed, and ranking too on page 1, site:www.general-hypnotherapy-register.com/hypnotherapists
eg http://www.general-hypnotherapy-register.com/hypnotherapists/?town=ockham however these pages are few and far between, these have a recent google cache date of Nov 1
**d) **The xml sitemap has all of the correct URLS, but in webmaster tools, the amount of pages indexed has been stubbornly flat at 2800 out of 4400 for 4 weeks now
e) Query Paramaters: for ?town and ?county in webmaster tools, are set to Yes/Specifies
Would love any suggestions,
Thanks.
Mark.
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Not 100% sure but those "rogue" pages look like pagination pages and no-indexing them could cause some issues. They don't have any content on there so I am not sure. Also, this is just correlation and I'm not saying its causation but Google+ links have indexed my sites extremely fast and the sites that utilize Google+ tend to have higher percentage of indexed pages. Again, correlation not necessarily causation.
Search Engine Land had a good article on SEO problems with pagination here.
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