View Full Version : Google Glitch or is it By Design?
jbgilbert
06-22-2004, 11:08 PM
I've seen no discussion in this forum about an issues that is being discussed in other forums and am a bit surprized...
It's about the many sites not ranking and showing in the index but with no title or description. Some are guessing it's a glitch while others are saying a penalty type filter associated with duplicate content....
I know there are some experienced people at this forum, so how about trying to shed some light on this issue.
Incubator
06-23-2004, 12:33 AM
I not sure of the title problem, but google does not give much weight or any weight sometimes to description meta tags, is there an example you can share ?
Cheers
Wc
littleman
06-29-2004, 01:22 PM
>showing in the index but with no title or description.
You mean where it is just showing a URL in their place? Usually that happens when the bot_crawl_to_database process hasn't happened yet. Are you seeing this on pages which were already in the DB?
seobook
06-29-2004, 02:31 PM
>showing in the index but with no title or description.
You mean where it is just showing a URL in their place? Usually that happens when the bot_crawl_to_database process hasn't happened yet. Are you seeing this on pages which were already in the DB?
it may also happen when the server is down when googlebot last tried to crawl the database
Webmaster T
06-29-2004, 04:18 PM
I have been trying to get to the bottom of this for some time. The only real clues I've got is that the page that are displayed like this are:
1. seldom in the results for a keyword search
2. often only found when doing a search of the site using the "site:www..." syntax
3. usually the recordset the page is based on is also a subset of a larger recordset found on another page or a deeper page of a multi-page recordset
4. they are AFAIK always dynamic pages.
5. occasionally it is a page which has a 500 response code (broken programming)
I have been working with a site that has a number of these. The 500 response got a title and description after I changed the link so the DB error was corrected. So the programming error mentioned above is, AFAIK, true however it isn't the only case where this occurs. This has been going on for months and Google is otherwise indexing the site as expected so I don't believe it is a case of the server being down when G comes to index.
There are some indications that a dupe filter of some sort also is a possible cause (see list above). There are also some indications that these pages are are symptomatic of cases where roadblocks to indexing seem to have been placed by G. This site has over 3500 product detail pages of which Google has exactly 29 (Yahoo! AFAICS has them all). The 29 pages that are indexed are linked to directly from the entry page or are embedded in articles linked to at the top of the link hierarchy. Any product pages linked only from recordsets are not in the index. That includes pages of recordsets that are indexed and have titles and descriptions.
If anyone else is having the same problem I'd appreciate hearing about it as I have tried several techniques to fix this and am baffled as to what the problem is particularly the non indexing of the product pages.
Falling Idols
06-30-2004, 11:06 AM
Hi,
I'm having the same problem with my website. Before the google-dance of last week i had 10,000 pages appearing in gg results with their description... Now i got 15,000 pages but only 50 of them appear with description
(only URL for the others).
The server wasn't down during GD, and if it's due to a kind of dupe filter, other sites i know would have suffer my problem.
So my question is : is it possible that googlebot detects URL-rewriting and only keeps a few pages generated by the script (php in my case) ??.
Thank you
sorry if it's not clear, i m french
Webmaster T
06-30-2004, 06:08 PM
IMO, re-writing isn't the issue. If it is only new pages that are affected I think it may be a case where titles and descriptions may be added at a later date (since they are freshly indexed). If some that had them previously but now they don't, then good luck I've run out of things to do! ;)
I have seen a couple of sites which have this problem and they appear to me to be due to some sort of manual Google intervention.
The sites in question had good PR (7) and competitive rankings, a few hundred pages in the main section and a bit less than that in the forum section, but at about the time of the last PR update, all the rankings and indexed pages disappeared, leaving only a couple of hundred partially indexed pages, but the PR and backlinks are intact. Both sites admitted to purchasing lots of links, and that could be the problem.