Micro-site homepage not being indexed

[PatrickDugan]

http://www.reebok.com/en-US/reebokonehome/

This is a homepage for an instructor network micro-site on Reebok.com

The robots.txt file was excluding the /en-US/ directory, we've since removed that exclusion, and resubmitted this URL for indexing via Google Webmaster but we are still not seeing it in the index.

Any advice would be very helpful, we may be missing some blocking issue or perhaps we just need to wait longer?

[EGOL]

Sometimes when you are excluding something and then open it up the search engines can take a while to forget the exclusion.

I would hit it with a link from the root homepage.  With your site that should put some spiders into it.

I don't know if this would cause a problem, but I think that this site might hold the world record for the size of a hidden input string.... about 30,000 characters.

[PatrickDugan]

Thank you, we will investigate the 30k characters piece and see if its just a function of time for now.  Any other ideas/issues that may be causing it to still not show up in the index?

[JaneCopland]

Hi Thomas,

I think your problem is partially duplicate content:

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=%22Once+you%E2%80%99re+approved+for+a+ReebokONE+profile+and+you+sign+up+for+the+commission+program%2C+visitors+can+purchase+products+displayed+on+your%22&oq=%22Once+you%E2%80%99re+approved+for+a+ReebokONE+profile+and+you+sign+up+for+the+commission+program%2C+visitors+can+purchase+products+displayed+on+your%22&aqs=chrome..69i57.1682j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=119&ie=UTF-8#filter=0&q=%22Once+you%E2%80%99re+approved+for+a+ReebokONE+profile+and+you+sign+up+for+the+commission+program%2C+visitors+can+purchase+products+displayed+on+your%22&safe=off

This page is virtually identical to a bunch of others in international subfolders, e.g. http://www.reebok.com/sv-SE/reebokonehome/Landing-Page/, http://www.reebok.com/sv-SE/reebokonehome/ (same page but without /Landing-Page/, http://www.reebok.com/nl-nl/reebokonehome/, etc.

It's highly unlikely that Google sees any of these resources as highly valuable on their own, given their duplicated many times. The solution here is pretty simple (in theory) though: the rel="alternative" tag (also referred to as the href lang tag) is meant for the purpose of telling Google that although these pages / subfolders, etc. are duplicates of each other, Version A is meant for the US, Version B for Sweden, Version C for Finland, etc. You can also create, for example, an English and Spanish version of the content for the United States and say: "these two pages are for a US audience but this one is for Spanish queries and this one for English."

Here are some resources about the tag:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

http://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool

Essentially, Google may be refusing to pick this page up because it's basically already seen it many, many times.

Cheers,

Jane