Pages not Indexed after a successful Google Fetch
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I am trying to understand why google isn't indexing key content on my site.
www.BeyondTransition.com is indexed and new pages show up in a couple of hours.
My key content is 6 pages of information for each of 3000 events (driven by mySQL on a wordpress platform).
These pages are reached via a search page, but no direct navigation from the home page.
When I link to an event page from an indexed page it doesn't show up in search results.
When I use fetch on webmaster tools the fetch is successful but is then not indexed - or if it does appear in results it's directed to the internal search page
e.g. http://www.beyondtransition.com/site/races/course/race110003/ has been fetched and submitted with links but when I search for BeyondTransition Ironman Cozumel I get these results....
So what have I done wrong and how do I go about fixing it? All thoughts and advice appreciated
Thanks
Denis
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Thanks Nick. I'll work through all of those points
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Not sure if it was a connection issue on my end or what, but that page takes a very long time to load, which could explain the lack of indexing of the pages linked from it.
Also, Google states that pages submitted witht the Fetch as Googlebot tool are not guaranteed to be indexed, so there may be quite a delay on that. Are all pages included in your XML sitemap? An XML sitemap is the preferred way to notify Google of pages it may not normally find. Here is a link to more about XML sitemaps https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=156184&hl=en
Even with an XML sitemap, Google may not immediately crawl many pages. Actually, indexing is rarely immediate. The frequency of crawling and speed of indexing has to do with many of the same factors as your ranking - quality, number of inbound links and pagerank, site performance, etc. If all your pages load quickly and you are in pretty good shape as far as links, etc, you could also try something to draw Google's attention to the new pages - like Tweeting a link or posting to Google+. That seems to "force" faster indexing in some cases.
I just checked your site with webpagetest.org and it is showing a load time of about 14 seconds. Tools.pingdom.com seemed to get hung up on some of the javascripts and couldn't complete its test. Doing what you can to speed up the site and address any other "quality" issues will help with indexing, and your performance in search engine results in general. -
I''m not sure - I created this page yesterday as a map of all the races and added to the bottom of the home page as 'site map'. I then added 'site map' to the index using fetch on webmaster tools and used the submit links option. This morning it's been indexed but after quick sample none of the links from it have been indexed (or appear in google search results).
This suggests its something that's wrong with my page/page design but what?????
So a widget will help, but only once I've figured out the underlying problem
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I''m not sure - I created this page yesterday as a map of all the races and added to the bottom of the home page as 'site map'. I then added 'site map' to the index using fetch on webmaster tools and used the submit links option. This morning it's been indexed but after quick sample none of the links from it have been indexed (or appear in google search results).
This suggests its something that's wrong with my page/page design but what?????
So a widget will help, but only once I've figured out the underlying problem
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Since it may not be practical to have every event linked through navigation, maybe a widget that shows the last maybe ten events would be good enough.
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Hi Nick,
Thanks for the answer. I've got a word press plugin but I don't think it captures everything so I'm in the process of manually generating an XML site map - but I think you have you finger on the answer why pages aren't crawled
Navigation is on the list of things to do - it's working out the relative urgency.
I like the RSS idea - time for some research on how to do it.
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You should use a XML site map to keep Google up to date with new pages. I could not find one for your site. Otherwise, if the event pages can only be found by using the search feature on your site, those pages will not probably not be crawled and indexed. you could also submit the feed to RSS sites Fetch as Googlebot may work, but it probably will not be as fast as using a sitemap.xml file.
Would it be possible to have the event pages available through some kind of navigation in addition to being found by your site's search?
You might also consider setting up an RSS feed of the events and submitting it to feed burner and other RSS sites. That may be a little complicated, but would also help speed up indexing.
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