Hello, I have been running a quite huge site for about five years now, with success. Well, this is, with a partial success. Because a year ago I discovered that only 500 of the about 3500 pages are accessed to. The other 3000 have nope, zero, nada visitors, although they have exactly the same structure, the same tags, the same niche, etc. But numbers are numbers, so there MUST be some error on these dead pages, but I can't really figure out what the problem could be. Not even a clue. So: can you help me with this sticky puzzle, dear members? As this is probably an individual 'case study', please PM me and I'll provide you with al the site details, URL, stats, the site structure and its history, a sitemap or anything you think you might need. If of course a solution is found that could help other members, I'll post them as soon as possible. Thank's!
Do you know if those pages are indexed? Are they any page that links to them or have you accidentally blocked access to them in your robots.txt or htaccess file?
I have no robot.txt. In no folder, nor in the root, nor in subfolders. And no htaccess inserted - as a matter of facts I learned about this here in this forum before I was a member and I did check that issue. Some pages are indexed (since many years), but for some reason, the indexing (and not indexing) appears to be alphabetical. All pages with products starting with A to D have visitors, the others not. And that's direct visitors I mean, straight from the search string in Google to the page. I have made some kind of a stupid error somewhere in the past years, but where??? Very frustrating and it did cost me sleepless nights and nights. And it's because I'm really not a professional SEO'er that I beg for help or advice from those who know more than I do.
It has to be that your pages are not indexed because your site hasn't been fully crawled, or they have same keywords and Google indexed the others instead. Get the URL's and and put them in the Google and Yahoo tool to add new pages to the index at www.google.com/submit_content.html Make a robots.txt file and a Sitemap.xml (read about them their self-explanatory) Then your pages will index. Do that first before going to other possibilities.
Thanks ezprint. I create a sitemap.xml once a month, since years and I submit it to Master Google of course who reads it carefully, up to a year ago, and then nope. This could indeed have been the prob, but i'm afraid there is more than that. I only wonder what. Probably just a detail I miss. Anyway, the sitemap itself is on double u (3) pharmamedicalpatients.net slash sitemap.xml (sorry, this post is not intended to create a backlink or so) And I understood from other threads here that a robot.txt is intended to block bots, not to 'invite' them or am I wrong? And, knowing that I don't have created/uploaded that file, why should the bot accept my - say - first 500 pages (in alphabetical order) and then ignore the rest?
Honestly, if you have 3500 pages, you may be too unfocused and providing information nobody gives a flying purple fish about... or have a major flaw in your navigation that's just stopping people from getting to them. you may also be at risk of getting slapped down for having too much duplicate content. Though without seeing the site in question, it's hard to weigh in.
if you dont have robots.txt then it wouldnt be the problem, wanted ot make sure there isnt one and it isnt blocking those pages. Google bots are just not going as deep into your pages anymore because your content hasnt updated enough for them to do so. The only way to induce that action is by doing 2 steps. 1. submit those pages to the link I supplied to you 2. Write an article, or blog page on Google Blog etc and have links to that page, or post those pages also to Topix.com in a paragraph and possibly also to Youtube in the details about a video. This will force the recognition of the webpage to be viewed by Google.
Sorry for the late reply, I've been away a few days, absolutely computerless, and I just came back home, but many thanks to the two posters above and the two PM's. I'll study that in depth tomorrow. Anyway, the site I'm talking about is www.pharmamedicalpatients.net. Mainly in French, but it´s not the content that is a problem I think, but the structure (or something else?). And by the way: If some member CAN point the error and give a solution, I'm ready to pay for that. Fed up with sleepless nights
umm, can i actually suggest that you look at updating your site and the way it looks, that might bring about better results. All of your navigation links that i clicked on were google ads (your welcome). I would expect the top navigation bar (which is google text ads) to help showcase products or something or other or even an about us page. Or if you want the top to be google text links, then id expect the side bar to have links to useful pages, or something. Id say that you would probly get alot of accidental clicks, but i doubt that anyone would really be using your site for its information.
You have a point, Matt. But it´s not definitive. ALL of my visitors land (mostly via Google) DIRECTLY on the specific page of the specific product they want information about and where they do find it. Plus some ads of course, but we're all in that business, aren't we...Only, this only works for the products starting with the letters A-D. A product starting, for example, with the letter N attracts nobody. The home and index pages are just intended for the search engines, to guide them, just like the sitemap. They are just used by a few visitors in a path helping them from the initially found page to the home/index page and then to another page.
Well, you have broken/invalid markup that could be making entire pages be ignored. Even the first page is bad in that regard: <td v<p><font face="Arial"> right near the top, is just plain gibberish -- that alone could make the entire home page be ignored. The markup is... well, horrifically out of date, and obviously slapped together with a WYSIWYG. What little CSS there is, seems to be inlined in the markup. It lacks a doctype so it's HTML 3.2/lower -- good luck getting that consistent cross browser. It uses tables for layout, non-semantic markup, empty paragraphs to do padding's job (NOT that I'd have those massive space wasting paddings), the numbered headings that are present make no sense (like an H5 without a h4, h3, h2 or even a h1 preceding it), the markup is incomplete missing many proper closing tags, and it uses tags like FONT which have no business on any website written after 1998. Diving into a sample subpage (the english Doxycycline one) it's similarly afflicted with just invalid and decade or more out of date markup -- worse than the home page! Endless pointless FONT attributes, headings wrapping non-heading elements. H5's wrapping H4's, closing tags for H5's that are never opened, paragrphs wrapping non-paragraph elements, line-breaks doing paragraph's job... It's even in windows-1252 encoding, which usually means kiss off anyone on a non-windows machine or even anything other than IE getting the page properly should any special characters be used... as a rule of thumb windows-1252 should NEVER be used on websites. I'm hardly surprised at a lack of traffic to certain pages, several of them load up blank here in Opera and FF -- and come up 'after a fashion' in IE. That can all be attributes to the fifteen year out of date pagebuilding methods that to be frank, weren't even proper or valid THEN. Which is why you're basically looking at throwing it out and recreating the entire site from scratch using MODERN coding techniques, and proper semantic use of HTML tag instead of the willy-nilly slapped together any old way code you have now... which given you said 3500 pages... OUCH. That's a LOT of work - But it's what should be done -- that's why it's called work, and not happy happy fun time. Even from a layout standpoint, the lack of a max-width to deal with the difficulty of reading long lines, blurry bolded serif fonts (serifs are for print, sans-serif for screen... say it with me people!)... actual navigation links shoved clear off the display below the fold on most displays, inconsistent layout or branding across pages, inconsistent navigation and no easy way to skip to sections without going 'home' first... Or the content! keyword-stuffing the "common search terms" at the bottom of multiple pages is probably getting you slapped down for keyword stuffing, AND duplicate content. It's just bad. Inconsistent, outdated, inaccessible, and it looks like you may have been preyed upon by a black-hat SEO scam artist at one point or another -- I recognize the tells.
Oh, it might also help to get a CMS under that to make it easier to have consistency across pages and auto-handle navigation... even a poor man's system (where you just use PHP to glue like bits together from static files) combined with semantic markup could make managing so many pages much, much simpler.
Wow, deathshadow, I learned a lot of your rep, but still, as a non professional, there are millions of items, things, words, suggestions in your reactions that I do NOT understand - and that's obviously my fault, even after years and years of site building. Super thanks!!! Absolutely. Would you mind if I sent you a more detailed PM tomorrow? I'm in the CET 0 zone, for documentation.
DS, keep it up. I felt as if I were in a time machine going forward slowly as I read your post. (And I've redone sites like that. Keep the content, throw out everything else and build the site from scratch.) Your suggestion to use a CMS is a good one for non-programmers.
Knock yourself out -- I've got non-24 sleep wake syndrome, and got tossed of my schedule by daytime appointments, so Christmas knows when I'm going to be awake/asleep the next few days.. Basically for me, a day is 26 hours long, so my schedule shifts forward 2 hours every day. (I sleep an extra 30 minutes, awake an extra hour and a half) -- If I try to maintain a 24 hour schedule, I get the equivalent of jet-lag. I get off schedule, and I'll have wonderful bouts of night terrors and insomnia, followed by the even more wonderful "can't stay awake long enough to pee, much less eat". So really, time zone is meaningless to me I'm in the middle of several major products, knee deep in the code of one of them (and getting really pissed at how the only reliable way across all servers to fetch a page in PHP is fsockopen since you can't rely on fopen being allowed, or curl being installed)... but when I have a spare moment I'll see if I can explain a few of the things I said in more detail for you.