Hello! I am new here, and am hoping to get some help with a problem I am having: Google has indexed all of my pages that are linked to from my site's MAIN index page; HOWEVER, anything that requires two clicks to get to hasn't been. Why is this? Let me give an example to clarify. mydomain.com -> mydomain.com/abc/index.php = INDEXED BUT mydomain.com -> mydomain.com/abc/index.php -> mydomain.com/abc/page2.php = NOT INDEXED Hopefully that makes some sense. Do I need meta robot tags telling it to 'follow' or whatnot? I was told those are obsolete now, so I haven't bothered with them. Any advice will be much appreciated!
Nope, PR4, but site was recently revamped and each section of the site was placed into it's own directory. Beforehand, all pages were like this: mydomain.com/page1.php mydomain.com/page2.php But are now like this: mydomain.com/page1/index.php mydomain.com/page2/index.php ...and as stated prior, any link you click on AFTER first going to /page1/index.php or /page2/index.php isn't being indexed.
well you just changed the whole directory structure of your site which was not smart so googlebot is probably crawling those old urls and are getting nothing but errors redirect the old pages to the new and get deep links to your new pages. Also submit a sitemap through the google sitemaps program probably gonna take some time to re-establish the trust in your site.
Unfortunately, the way I had the content pages set up prior to the revamp just wasn't convenient any longer. My number of content pages multiplied by 5 or more, so I needed to organize things in a more convenient way. Hence the change. Like I said, all of the content pages you can get to from my index page have already been updated and indexed by Google... but it's the other ones that you have to go through two links to get to that Google doesn't seem to be recognizing/indexing... and redirects wouldn't help, because they are new content pages. They didn't exist before the revamp. As for the sitemap, I've looked into it, but it seems rather involved/complicated, and I just don't have the time at the moment; it's just a site I do in my spare time. Any further help/tips/advice will be much appreciated. Thanks!
nyahkon, if your not going to redirect old pages to new pages then google is going to treat them as new content and you'll have the same growing pains as a brand new website (trust factor). Just an outside observation. It's hard to really say with out an url (could be other factors). As far as sitemaps, not hard, not complicated, might help if you try. You never know, seems to be mixed reviews with sitemaps. Helps some with indexing & some it doesn't.
So just redirect them with a 301? I've gone ahead and used this in my .htaccess file for all of the pages I want to redirect: Redirect 301 /abc1.php http://www.mydomain.com/abc1/index.php Is that right? Hopefully it will help things a bit. ...though it still doesn't solve my original issue of getting the new content pages indexed. (I will look into the sitemap, though). Do I need to tell the meta tags to index,follow? Or is that what search engines already do by default? Just want to make sure. Thanks.
Was this ok to do? Seems a lot of the new pages that were indexed by Google are no longer indexed. Not sure if it's just a temporary fluke or whatnot, but we'll see. They will probably be back in the index in a day or so (this has happened in the past). Anyway, thanks.