Three months ago my site gaming-nation.com had it's indexed pages droped and had a 10 month old results put up. Nothing has changed within the last three months. Google visits everyday, but the results don't change and it hasn't indexed my homepage. Usually I am patient, but I really think this is a glitch and not normal. I had nearly 150k pages indexed, then all of a sudden all my pages droped and a 10 month old result set put up, all of which hasn't changed for 3 months, something is wrong.
Hello dethfire, I did a search on Google for site:www.gaming-nation.com AND site:gaming-nation.com and came up with two different page counts. site:www.gaming-nation.com = 663 pages site:gaming-nation.com = 764 pages Google may think these are two different sites with duplicate content. You may wish to look into doing a 301 permanant redirect from one to the other.
Wouldn't this be the case for any other site though? The majority of the time the "www" is trival when entering a web address.
I'm not an expert, but it does seem quite true that Google treats any difference in URL as a distinct page. And while, as you correctly point out, most servers (though not all) will indiscriminately serve the same page regardless of whether or not it is called with a leading "www.", a link to one with that lead will be seen by Google (and, I'd guess, most or all of the others) as a link to a page different from the "same" URL without that lead. This can drive one bananas, owing to the way other sites will randomly either ignore a leading "www." if your site or email showed it, or, alternatively, add it in on their own if it does not. I wasted a lot of time emailing sites with the "wrong" form till Shawn and others kindly pointed out that a "301 Moved Permanently" redirect will carry all the linking page's PR effect over to the link as you want it seen. I think putting in such redirects is important. You can do it from your .htaccess file easily. Once you have it in place, as soon as Google re-visits any page linking to the "wrong" form, theirPR credit will be re-assigned to the "right" page. I will show you the form of the lines I amusing in my file, but you should verify with an expert that the form is correct (all I can say is that it seems to work for me): <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} www.gaming-nation.com RewriteRule ^(.*) http://gaming-nation.com/$1 [L,R=301] </IfModule> (That is assuming you want to use the form without the "www." as your "correct" page--if not, you would remove the "www." from one form above and add it to the other.) I wouldn't at all mind an expert here remarking on whether or not that is the correct, or best, form for those lines, which I created from some earlier tips from Shawn plus the Apache module documentation and some trial and error. If you need to know more about the .htaccess file in general, an expert should reply.
Sorry, I am NOT an expert. I thought to check your pages for the two urls because I have read MANY threads from people having similar problems. I actually had Google counting the same page as two pages. When I did a seach for site:www.mydomain.com it reported the "pages" link this... www.mydomain.com/directory/page.html then again as www.mydomain.com/Directory/page.html I could not believe my eyes. But, of course, it had happened because there were links to the page written both ways.
McDar is spot on here. The problems occur when someone links back to you using the non www. URL, google then spiders the site and gets a little confused. It is also splitting your page rank, so get that 301 in place
I thought this was an interesting point too - I have always checked site:www.mysite.com so I decided to check site:mysite.com. What I found is this: 20 pages are listed using both methods... any thoughts on why this might be? The site is only about a month old, and the small handful of backlinks list my full url. In addition, when I checked this morning, only 15 pages showed up and all my page descriptions except for the index page are gone (they were always there when 20 pages were listed) Could this be a datacenter issue and could this also be tied into the fluctuating PR issues that had been going on the past few weeks? Depending on the time of day, the PR jumps between PR1 and PR4. What thoughts do you have on these issues?? (My site is listed below in the sig if you care to investigate) Regards, IONWeb ION Website Design P.S... I can supply a sample .htaccess 301 redirect is you need one to use
IONWeb, This is very common for new sites or for new pages. I just checked your site on the datacentertool (link below) for site:www.ionwebdesign.com and found very different page counts across the servers. The best way to view this is the enter your search then at the far right you will find 2 radio buttons with lines next to them and a "GO" button under them. Select the last radio button and preform your search. [note: you can change from vertical to horizontal views at any time. Just make your selection and click on "GO"] Viewing the results in the horizontal view allows you to see the number of results returned for a search. The data that Google uses is updated (more appropriately, "supplimented")each day with freshbot results. New pages or new sites get crawled by the spiders (read freshbots) and supplimented to the results. [do NOT confuse this with Googles "Supplimental Results"] The reason the new stuff shows up is because the freshbots found it, NOT because it has been indexed. SO, if a page is new and freshbot does not show up today, the page will not show up in the results for that day. Once the new page has been indexed, then it will show up on a daily bases, regardless of a freshbot visit. It is very important for us to broaden the way we think of our websites. Our sites are not Islands of SEO excellence! In today's Google, websites are built on the foundation of LINKS. Where we are in the results today depends greatly on the success of our "partners" as well. Movement in the serps is probably 99% due to changes in links or linking partners. ALL of what we rely on, is constantly changing as Google updates literally 1000s of servers. If you have 100 links to your page, that is 100 variables right there that can effect your placement in the serps today. The more stable they are, the more stable you are! That is why link farms are so bad. Link farms are built like a house of cards. Google dosn't penalize sites. It is just that if one becomes unstable, they are so "interlinked" that they all start to tumble and there goes your foundation. ANYWAY: There are a great many pieces that must fall into place to bring stability to your page/site. It takes time! If you have not already noticed this thread, you can see the changes and fluctuations of the things I just mentioned here... http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=2690#post2690
IONWeb, You can never tell where Google picks up information about your pages. Remember, Google only reports links from PR4 or above. There can be a great many more out there. If you are seeing this in your results from Google, you may want to think about a 301 redirect as well. All this does is tell Google that all calls to domain.com are really suppose to be to www.domain.com.
Thanks for the detailed answer McDar - much appreciated I have spent most of my time developing the content of the site (after all, the site is for visitors) I am just now starting the process of deveolping links but I am trying to make sure they are relevant links. I used your tool (which is quite helpful by the way ) and saw the results you are talking about. What is unclear to me is why for the last three weeks - I had full descriptions for every page listed (20 in all) instead of google just showing the URL. I realize the rest of the pages do not have PR - but why were they listed consistently for the past three weeks? In addition, it appears as if googlebot is spidering my site daily - but I can not tell what pages it is hitting. Unless there is a problem in my navigation scheme - it should be able to go through the site freely (maybe you might see something that I do not) IONWeb ION Website Design
IONWeb, I had the same thing going on for a while. Google came and hit the main page MAYBE on or two more then left. This went on for quite a while. Now it is somewhat back to normal (whatever "normal" is for Google). I have found spidering activity increased in direct proportion to the number of backlinks I acquired. Good backlinks send the spiders to your site often and hungry.
LOL - very true. I completely agree McDar - I just need to start working on the links now that my content is just about complete. Am still waiting on DMOZ but the major SE's are spidering now. But, until the rest of my pages reach PR4, I don't know that I am an acceptable candidate unless my return link is on my home page which is PR4. Not sure I completely understand how or when PR travels to other pages within my own site - but is is well structured/linked I do believe. ION Website Design
it is reranking or reindexing google will do it each month , it will some way increment or decrement your index ranking , accourding to the traffic