Help... Google / search engines wont index some of my content

Discussion in 'Search Engine Optimization' started by Wonder1, Apr 13, 2013.

  1. #1
    Before I start, dont expect this to be too easy. This really has me puzzled and will be a little surprised if anyone had an immediate answer.

    We have a wordpress website, launched over 6 months ago and have never had an issue getting content such as pages and post pages and categories indexed. However, I some what recently (about 2 months ago) installed a directory plugin (Business Directory Plugin) which lists businesses via unique urls that are accesible from a sub folder. Its these business listings that I absolutely cannot get indexed.
    The index page to the directory which links to the business pages is indexed, however for some reason google is not indexing all the listing pages which are linked to from this page. Its not an issue of the content being uncrawlable or at least dont think so as when I run crawlers on my site such as xml sitemap crawlers it finds all the pages including the directory pages so I am sure its not an issue of the search engines not finding the content. I have created xml sitemaps and uploaded to webmaster tools, tools recongises that there are many pages in the xml sitemap but google continues to only index a small percentage (everything but my business listings).
    The directory has been there for about 8 weeks now so I know there is a issue as it should of been indexed by now.
    See our main website at www.smashrepairbid.com.au and the business directory index page at www.smashrepairbid.com.au/our-shops/
    To throw in a curve ball, in looking into this issue and setting up tools we noticed a lot of 404 error pages (nearly 4,000). We were very confused where these were coming from as they were only being generated from search engines - humans could not access the 404s and so we are guessing se's were firing some javascript code to generate them or something else weird. We could see the 404s in the logs so we know they were legit but again feel it was only search engines, this was validated when we added some rules to robots.txt and we saw the errors in the logs stop. We put the rules in robots txt file to try and stop google from indexing the 404 pages as we could not find anyway to fix the site / code (no idea what is causing them). If you do a site search in google you will see all the pages that are omitted in the results.
    Since adding the rules to robots, our impressions shown through tools have jumped right up (increased by 5 times) so thought this was a good indication of improvement but still not getting the results we want.
    Does anyone have any clue whats going on or why google and other se's are not indexing this content? Any help would be greatly appreciated and if you need any other information to assist just ask me.
    Really appreciate anyone who can spare their time to help me, I sure do need it.
    Thanks.
     
    Wonder1, Apr 13, 2013 IP
  2. Focl

    Focl Notable Member

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    #2
    Verift if you allowed acces for google crawlers

    Wordpred admin panel -> Settings -> Reading -> Search Engine Visibility
    Make sure this box is unchecked
     
    Focl, Apr 14, 2013 IP
  3. Wonder1

    Wonder1 Greenhorn

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    #3
    Focl thanks for your reply, however yes my site allows crawlers. If you read my original message you will read that most ordinary wordpress pages are indexed, just not the pages in that certain directory which come from the plugin. The plugin has no setting for disallowing search engines and my robots.txt doesn't either.
     
    Wonder1, Apr 16, 2013 IP