Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Nick,

first of all, thanx for your responses.

I already did the "fetch as Googlebot" thing 5 days ago. The page was successfully crawled and has been sent to the index successfully, according to Google Webmaster Tools. But in these 5 days, nothing changed.

I like your suggestions with the extra text. We will add some and do the "fetch as Googlebot" again and see what happens.

And you are absolutely right when it comes to the "value" of this page. It didn't send that much traffic, just a little. It is no big deal for us if this page doesn't get back into the index - but as someone doing SEO I want to figure out the problem Google seems to have with this page - just to test and learn for future problems

Quite strange - I see someone visiting this URL in the Google-Analytics real-time-report.

Traffic source is direct, and Google labels this site as "/empty". Any ideas why?

Hi Nick,

I knwo the page is not full of content - but if you count the words, they are almost 300. And we do not have pages with the same content or links on our domain.

It could be a solution to add more text, but what about pages with partner links, for example? They normally have no content and lots of external links - so they should also be seen an "thin pages"?!

Hi Tom,

well, honestly, we do not have a sitemap...

And no, there are no other pages with similar content on our domain.

As you said it: quite odd!

Hi everyone!

Some days ago, I noticed that one of our URLs (http://www.access.de/karriereplanung/webinare) is no longer in the Google index.

We never had any form of penalty, link warning etc. Our traffic by Google is constantly growing every month. This single page does not have an external link pointing to it - only internal links.

The page has been indexed all the time. The HTTP status code is 200, there is no noindex or something in the code. I submitted the URL on GWMT to let Google send it to the index. It was crawled successfully by Google, sent to the index 5 days ago - nothing happened, still not indexed.

Do you have any suggestions why this page is no longer indexed? It is well linked internally and one click away from the home page. There is still the PR of 5 showing, I always thought that pages with PR are indexed.......

Hi all,

we recently launched some articles with photo galleries. Our CMS produces a single URL for each photo you click--> www.domain.com/article-url/photogallery/1, www.domain.com/article-url/photogallery/2 and so forth...

We have 6-15 photos in our galleries. Each photo has a caption which contains 1-3 sentences. We do not advertise on our pages, so these gallery pages just contain of the top navigation, sidebar, footer, picture and the caption.

My question: Google is indexing these URLs, do you think that they will be considered spammy, as there is almost no content on these pages? Should we noindex them? Or canonical them to the article URL? Or write more content to each photo and let them be indexed???

Thanx....

Hi Moosa,

I guess you were right. Teh PR cam back friday evening. Seemed to be an update problem....

Hi Dorothea,

we didn`t buy or sell links. Indeed, there has been no linkbuilding at all, the backlink profile is really natural  - this is no joke!!

By "all other sites" I mean other pages on our domain (categoreis with PR of 5 etc..).

In Webmaster Tools there is nothing suspicious: no warning, lo lost indexed pages, the same number of backlinks....

And honestly, I dont think that our PR goes down from 6 to unranked because of a weird domain lining to us. We have really strong (natural) backlinks from german universities etc. that should "protect" us.

But I think you are right, I am waiting some more days to see if anything is changing...

Hi all,

after coming back from the holidays, I noticed that our PR (6 on the homepage) has vanished into "Unranked". All other sites are also "unranked". I tested other domains - PR still there, so the problem does not lie in the PR checker.

There are no drops in traffic, rankings, no messages in the GWMT, the same numer of indexed pages, inbound links okay (all natural)...

As you see, I checked everything I thought could be a hint to a solution, but found nothing... This goes on for the 3rd day now (after my holidays, maybe even longer).

Could there be a technical problem causing this "drop"?

Our website: http://www.access.de/

I am thankful for all hints/suggestions...

Thanx...

Hi all,

we recently filled our robots.txt file to prevent some directories from crawling.

Looks like:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /Views/
Disallow: /login/
Disallow: /routing/
Disallow: /Profiler/
Disallow: /LILLYPROFILER/
Disallow: /EventRweKompaktProfiler/
Disallow: /AccessIntProfiler/
Disallow: /KellyIntProfiler/
Disallow: /lilly/

now, as Google Webmaster Tools hasn't updated our robots.txt yet,

I checked our robots.txt in some ckeckers.

They tell me that the User agent: * contains an error.

**Example:**

**Line 1: Syntax error! Expected <field>:</field> <value></value>

1: User-agent: ***

**`I checked other robots.txt written the same way --> they work,`** 

accordign to the checkers...

**`Where the .... is the mistake???`**
```

Hi all,

a short one: is there a firefox add-on available, which lets you see the crawl frequency of your page(s)? Would be interesting to see if google bot comes around more lately...

There are some statistics in the webmaster tools, but I don't find them very attractive

I know there is something for Wordpress, but we don't use it...

I don't to put up an excel-sheet and check the cache-version for myself. And I would love to see how deep the crawler gets and which sites do not get crawled...

So, any existing add-ons or tools that are for free??

Thanx....

Hi,

I know there are several questions and articles concerning the rel=canonical on SEOmoz, but I didn't find the answer I was looking for...

We have some job pages, URLs are: /jobs and then jobs/2, jobs/3 etc..

Our blog pages follow the same: /blog, /blog2, /blog/3...

Our CMS is self-produced, and every job/blog-page has the same title tag. According to SEOmoz (and the Webmaster Tools), we have a lots of duplicate title tags because of this problem.

If we put the rel=canonical on each page's source code, the title tag problem will be solved for google, right? Because they will just display the /job and /blog main page. That would be great because we dont want 40 blog pages in the index.

My concern (a stupid question, but I am not sure): if we put the rel=canonical on the pages, does google crawl them and index our job links? We want to keep our rankings for our job offers on pages 2-xxx.

More simple: will we find our job offers on jobs/2, jobs/3... in google, if these pages have the rel=canonical on them?

AND ONE MORE: does the SEOmoz bot also follow the rel=canonical and then reduce the number of duplicate title-tags in the campaigns???

Thanx........

Hi Russ,

thanks for yiur help, made things clearer to me!

One last question concerning the linking of the content: if we noindex all pages with less than x words, we can still put the links on dofollow, or doesn't it make sense?

Because if we create an overview page with the latest questions on it, it should be good for G and our users. So if we link to all latest threads (index and noindex), the users and G will find all the relevant content, G can follow the links on the noindexed pages and finds other content and so on...

Or doesn't it make sense to you? I am just worried that we will have many pages with small content and the Q&A will look empty to both G and our users...

Hi everyone,

our company wants to launch a Q&A forum on our website. The goal is to keep the useres interacting with our website, generate leads (of course) and... last but not least... to generate UGC for our website (and Google of course)...

[We organise career events with big companys for students, professionals, give career advice etc..]

From a SEO perspective, I find the following points difficult to overcome:

• the possible problem of "thin" content, many URL's with a question and only 1 or 2 answers will not look good for Google, especially when there are a lot of it (Panda-Update). One solution could be to noindex pages with thin content, but imagine that you have an active community, this could take ages and we got other things to do...

• the problem of finding ALL content: what would be the best solution to make sure that G finds all UGC, even the older content? Would it be enough to link to older questions on the page of the actual question? Let's say, this page contains links to the 5 questions before and so on... Or should there be categories of questions, where you list all of the questions ever asked???

• would you/can one optimise the content? Users do not ask questions with the beloved keywords and if there would be a standard solution that the URL and the Title-Tag contains the question, there could be a lot of strange/not useful pages on our domain...

I hope I could make clear what my problems are and I hope someone can give me some good advice...

Thanx!!

Hi Irving,

yes, you are right. The https login page is the "problem", other pages that I visit after are staying on https, as all the links on these page are https links. So you could surf all the pages on the domain in a https mode, if you visited the login page before

I spoke to our it department about this problem and they told me it would take time to program our CMS different. My boss then told me to find another, cheaper solution -  so I came up with the noindex,nofollow.

So, do you see another solution whithout having to ask our it department again? They< are always very busy and almost have no time for nobody

Hi Malcolm,

thankx for the help. Before we put the noindex, nofollow on these pages, I thought about using the rel=canonical.

To be honest, I did not choose rel=canonical because I think that the noindex,nofollow ia a stronger sign for Google, and that the rel=canonical is more like a hint, which G does not always follow... but sure, i can be wrong!

You are saying that the noindex could end worse. The https-pages only contain links to https-pages, think of these pages like "normal" pages, same content, link structure etc. etc. Every URL just is a https, internal, external....

So I thought the noindex,nofollow would not hurt the http pages, because they cannot be found on the https ones - what do you think?

Hi all,

my problem is the following: our CMS (self-developed) produces https-versions of our "normal" web pages, which means duplicate content.

Our it-department put the <noindex,nofollow>on the https pages, that was like 6 weeks ago.</noindex,nofollow>

I check the number of indexed pages once a week and still see a lot of these https pages in the Google index. I know that I may hit different data center and that these numbers aren't 100% valid, but still... sometimes the number of indexed https even moves up.

Any ideas/suggestions? Wait for a longer time? Or take the time and go to Webmaster Tools to kick them out of the index?

Another question: for a nice query, one https page ranks No. 1. If I kick the page out of the index, do you think that the http page replaces the No. 1 position? Or will the ranking be lost? (sends some nice traffic :-))...

thanx in advance

Hi all,

my problem is the following: our CMS (self-developed) produces https-versions of our "normal" web pages, which means duplicate content.

Our it-department put the <noindex,nofollow>on the https pages, that was like 6 weeks ago.</noindex,nofollow>

I check the number of indexed pages once a week and still see a lot of these https pages in the Google index. I know that I may hit different data center and that these numbers aren't 100% valid, but still... sometimes the number of indexed https even moves up.

Any ideas/suggestions? Wait for a longer time? Or take the time and go to Webmaster Tools to kick them out of the index?

Another question: for a nice query, one https page ranks No. 1. If I kick the page out of the index, do you think that the http page replaces the No. 1 position? Or will the ranking be lost? (sends some nice traffic :-))...

thanx in advance

Thanks Nakul and Harald for helping.

So, we will implement the rel=canonical on these pages...

Thanx again!!!

Hi there,

I know many people might ask this kind of question, but nevertheless ....

In our CMS, one single URL (http://www.careers4women.de/news/artikel/206/) has been produced nearly 9000 times with strings like this: http://www.careers4women.de/news/artikel/206/$12203/$12204/$12204/ and this http://www.careers4women.de/news/artikel/206/$12203/$12204/$12205/ and so on and so on...

Today, I wrote our IT-department to either a) delete the pages with the "strange" URLs or b) redirect them per 301 onto the "original" page.

Do you think this was the best solution? What about implementing the rel=canonical on these pages?

Right now, there is only the "original" page in the Google index, but who knows? And I don't want users on our site to see these URLs, so I thought deleting them (they exist only a few days!) would be the best answer...

Do you agree or have other ideas if something like this happens next time?

Thanx in advance...