I started a travel site a couple of months ago Deals on Everything!. It is the first web site I have done and I see it as a learning experience more than anything. I managed to get a link from a PR4 ranked home page and the googlebot started to look at my home page and all pages linked from my home page every day, sometimes twice. Titles and descriptions were cached and I had a few hits from google. I obtained a few links and have quickly build pages, particularly within hotel section where I have created 12,000 individual hotel pages. About a month ago I started to use the google sitemap service and shortly after submitting, when I did a site search on google, it said 15,600 (or so) pages were in its index, however only the ones the googlebot had visited had titles and descriptions (obviously). I noticed after submitting the sitemap that google would visit around 300 pages each day. About a fortnight ago all the titles and descriptions vanished from google except for 3 pages (which seem quite randomly selected). I wonder if have have done something wrong? Altho' if I had upset them in some way, surely all titles and descriptions would have gone? The only thing I can think of is that I recreated all the hotel pages with new titles (page names became hotel names rather than a number) but by mistake I left alink to the old ones on a page - even though I thought it had been deleted it remained in the code on one page. Could I have a duplicate penalty problem? Or is it simply that the site has grown quickly and google has become a bit shy? I would appreciate any thoughts if you can help shed some light on this. Thanks.
All these pages have no content compared to the static stuff around it. They don't deserve a place in the index. All these pages are thin affiliates, it doesn't look like you added anything to the aff pitch so it's duplicate content. Besides the cottages etc. you don't have many content pages. The ones linked on the left all have good content.
Hi Smyrl - I know what you're saying and thanks for having a look, but the pages will have more content added as I introduce local attraction for hotels, guest reviews, etc. But surely the fact they have links does not remove a listing in google from Hotels in London - London hotels, etc.. Get great deals on London hotels blah blah blah blah blah blah www.deals-on-everything.co.uk/hotels.php to www.deals-on-everything.co.uk/hotels.php and no more? My question was - why were they in and then not, except for about three?
TOPS30 - thanks for your comments. Does google decide which are good and which are bad and list as you suggest? I thought they would be indexed but ranked according to how good or bad. Hope my point makes sense. Thanks for having a look in any case.
All I know is Google has really come down hard on duplicate content/lack of content recently. Even way way before that they quit indexing my links pages. About the time people's links pages dropped out people started calling them resource pages or other names. I do not think the name of page was the problem but lack of content. Shannon
Shannon - there seem to be loads of directories appearing on a daily basis - how are these getting through? I think my main confusion was that if only one page had remained cached, I would have expected it to be the home page. I guess the answer is to try to create something different to everybody else.