google drop : due to logins?

[newreality]

This may be a coincidence, but my google serps have fallen when I applied a pair of logins to my site. (the connecting page use sessions/restricted access by username/password)

Is this a coincidence, shouldn't googlebot be smart enough to tell when to go "around this" obstable. Or does GB simply come to a halt and leave the site entirely, especially if it encountered this early on. This why many sites moved to the practive of linking to a login page, making it a two step process?

Does this matter or is there another reason for the drop?

(one phrase results in Google top forty - not great, but at least a place to start for popular term, on another very popular phrase top 90. I'm working on the links. MSN for both SERPS are top 15)

[Joseph Morin]

Most likely, by applying logins, you are giving Googlebot an obstacle that it cannot get around. Without looking at your site I can't say for certain, but when you apply logins, one of the first things that usually happens is that the number of indexed pages is diminished therefore limiting the net that you cast out on the web to draw in traffic from deeply crawled pages. You may previously have had traffic from internal pages that are no longer in Google's index due to the logins that it cannot get around to deep crawl so those pages that previously were in the index are now dropped. The assumption here is that you are optimizing your homepage and perhaps a few internal pages but deep content is now restricted to members (and now keeping search engines out of your deep content).

Hope this helps ;)

[newreality]

Thank You Joseph,

I thought the pages being restricted now would be excluded. That's okay, they're all interface pages.

But -- to rephrase it -- are the restricted pages causing Google to turn away from the rest that are not restricted and that should be indexed? Better yet could the fact that I now have restricted pages be causing a problem with the sitewide link structure as it appears anyway -- broken in spots?

Although the non-restricted pages are indexed when I do a link check, they are not showing up under SERPS as they used to.

[Joseph Morin]

It shouldn't...unless there were other factors besides your login page additions that are now affecting your crawlability such as newly dynamic pages, new sessions IDs or perhaps the login page is now between pages that were passing internal link popularity thus reducing your relevance for terms that were previously in Googles index.

For instance, if you had good internal linking structure that say passed good link pop back to your home page from 100 internal pages that is now only 25 pages because the rest are restricted, yes you may lose some positions in the SERPs because youve restricted that link pop and now the home page cannot pass as much link popularity back to your site index and main catagory pages which in turn spread that popularity throughout your site.

[Webmaster T]

This may be a coincidence, but my google serps have fallen when I applied a pair of logins to my site. (the connecting page use sessions/restricted access by username/passwordAre Sessions being used on the pages you want indexed? and if so, are the SessionIDs required or in the url with a parameter name that is ID or session? GGuy has stated SessionsID's in urls can be a problem. IMO, this is easier to detect if the parameter name indicates it is a session or unique identifier. eg: ID.

[newreality]

When doing a pages that "link to" the index page, under Google shouldn't pages show a link to them? All secondary pages have text links back to the home page, and with links on the home page to them. The index links are all html'd in the same way (.com/index/htm -- could this be a problem?). Pages having these used to show.

Now about 13 much needed pages are showing up as missing. Link checks now give only a couple links from within the site. Same goes for MSN as Google (showing only couple, but different links) Just few internal pages. The missing ones have at least the same PR value as the ones being dislayed.

This is causing big trouble. Hardly showing on google at all any more.

To answer the question above -- the logins use session id's but these are not on the pages I want inddexed.

Does anybody happen to have a testbot program to show how bots crawl sites?

I'm not convinced its due to the logins since my other (2) sites are having the same problems, with other designs. Also, the logins do not appear on the home page of the site mentioned, there are only links leading to login pages. And, links higher on the html source page appearing before the logins are not showing as being linked to the index.

What what could be the problem?