Old respected site is losing pages in Google

I am the owner of an old, respected music oriented website which has been active since the year 2000. We have gathered a large number of incoming links and have been widely appreciated by both business professionals and fans alike throughout the years which has resulted in most of our pages showing up on the top 10 results in Google searches.

Now, a while back we redesigned the site to make it dynamic (it was static from the start which was a real pain in the ass but back then I had none or very little server side knowledge), using url rewrites and dynamic titles etc. So far, so good. No drastic changes occurred even though there were naturally temporary ups and dows during the re-indexing process.

A few months back I wanted to introduce new material to the site, making some of the older pages more up to date and featuring more unique and extensive texts than before. This is where the problems began. Many pages of this section, including several of the recently updates ones, dropped like stones in water in the Google index. Currently, approximately 1/4 of the pages of this section are indexed (at all) in Google while Yahoo still indexes pretty much all of them although they are far from as important to us (and most others).

Both Google and Yahoo bots crawl our site pretty much non stop so it seems very unlikely that they would have discovered something brand new that was not known before.

Does anyone have an idea of what might have happened and what I can do to relieve myself of this issue? It has affected us greatly and it seems very unfair. Strangely enough Google has left out some of our most informative pages while others that at this point display very little information rank extremely well.

Finally, a question about page titles. Our dynamic version use this pattern:

[SITE NAME] - [ARTIST] - [GENRE AND GEOGRAPHICAL ORIGIN]

Would it be wise to remove the last section of the page title? After all, that seems more relevant considering our content.

However, I don't think the titles could have anything to do with our strange issue described above, could they? One of my theories is that Google might have trouble distinguishing what is most important and might rank the last section of the page title too high.

 

Your pages might be in google secondary index. Google does not throw away pages. They first put it in secondary index. There are ways you can bring them back.

But first check if they are in secondary index

How do you do that

Go to google.com
use site:YourURL

and do same on AOL

If Aol shows more pages than Google, your pages are def. in secondary index.

 

On the contrary, AOL shows fewer pages than Google.

 

Can you give me your URL, i wil check

 

I did not find problem anywhere.

Do this immediately, Configure Google Webmaster Tool. You don't even have sitemap.xml. Create one and send it to the google.

Start doing Link building, Get some high PR links for the pages that are not crawled.

I think all this must have happened when you were changing the site. Have you changed the URL?? If you have changed the URL, use 301 redirects, probably google is still looking for old pages.

 

Thanks for trying to help although I think you are wrong. The transformation into a dynamic site structure happened a long time before this problem showed up and Google quickly adopted the new link structure without any major flaws. There are url rewrites in action both for the old url structure as well as the new one (the url of the site itself has not changed).

We have never had a sitemap.xml and I don't really see how it would help in solving this issue? Our problem is not that the site is not crawled. On the contrary, both Google and Yahoo bots crawl these pages all the time (I decided to log their activity when the problem first appeared). A few of the "lost" pages I have checked have bounced in and out of the index.

I always use 301 redirects for "moved pages" and I sincerely doubt that Google is still looking for old pages.

Link building for many of these individual pages is very difficult.

 

>We have never had a sitemap.xml and I don't really see how it would help in solving this issue? Our problem is not that the site is not crawled. On the contrary, both Google and Yahoo bots crawl these pages all the time (I decided to log their activity when the problem first appeared). A few of the "lost" pages I have checked have bounced in and out of the index.

why don't you give it try with google sitemap

 

Yes sitemap could help, also check your internal link structure - are your links organized so pages are logically interlinked? Finally make sure your CMS isn't creating duplicate content problems with different URLs for the same page (eg. wordpress is notorious for this).

Probably not the problem but for SEO reasons I would title the pages like this with the dynamic important info first:
[ARTIST] - [SITE NAME]

 

I would also advice you this, and that you do this with almost any page on your site.
Google tends to rank a page higher for the first terms appearing on its title/URL. So I would definitely put "Site Name" at the end of the title.

 

Thanks to all for such a nice, interesting and informative discussion. I’ve learned a lot from your thread so far. Thanks

 

Yeah, there are plenty of logical links between many of these pages. Our site is completely made by ourselves (me) so we do not rely on any other CMS. Wordpress is however very good for SEO purposes if you just use a couple of plug-ins.

I think Google is smart enough to recognize the site name no matter where in the title it appears? Would you exclude that third part of the title entirely you mean?

 

Good point - I always put my most important keywords first in my meta data

 

My men i think that you did a lot and for the best changes but what i suspect is that you did a seo mistake in that process.No reverse action only for bad will be made.Try to identify the reason,find it and then you gained seo experience .Your site will propably come back strong .Try to promote it and be patient.

 

Well, I AM trying to identify the reason, that was kind of why I posted this thread in the first place =) I will add the sitemap first at least and see if it makes any difference.

 

if you need help making a sitemap, let me know

 

Everything is ok with your website, after doing some renewing google reindexes pages and they can be dropping and going up often, to be perfectly sure, you have to build sitemap with correct priorities.

 

Yeah, I know that but, like I said, the site transformation was made long before this problem appeared and has nothing to do with it.

 

also try this

put links to the pages that google has dropped from their index. Put the link in footer of yoru homepage. Just see if it makes any difference. If google will index it thru your home page.

 

I think that would be too obvious and risky. We have approximately 11000 of those pages and it makes little relevance having those links there.

 

Yes, I would go for that also, [ARTIST] - [BAND/GROUP] - [SITENAME], be smart ...and for the non-indexed pages, try using a sitemap generator, regenerate your webpages, and stuff them inside the Webmaster tools for reindexing. Also check if some of your incoming links are still linking to you and your articles and if the links are reliable.