Content page being ranked lower than menu page.

[amf123]

Hi

Looked through various forums and googled but could not find anything to help me on this.

I run an upcoming events website that has a page that lists events and has links to further information about each event.
That page is http://secure.allmyfun.com/eventlistspi.jsp . When I search google for one of the events in the system (I used search term "Anomaly by Neil Fleming" ..without the quotes) it listed the aforementioned page of links that contains that term as one of the links, but not the more detailed page about the event that you reach by following the link. I would presume that the more detailed page would rank higher. That page is http://secure.allmyfun.com/eventdetailspi.jsp?eventID=533332

I thought at first that it might be a problem with the "?" in the URL, but another website lists the event on a dynamic page as well...
http://www.calgarysun.com/perl-bin/niveau2.cgi?s=arts&p=77820.html&a=1
(click it to see the fully expanded link) and it shows up in the google listings no problem.

The other thing I was wondering is if Google maybe does not follow links on a page that contains more than a certain number of links.

In the end, I'd like the detailed pages to come up when a person types a search term related to that page's contents.

Greatly appreciate any input...I'm stumped.

Thanks!
Trent

[PhilC]

To answer your second question first:- Google has a 100k limit on filesize - anything over 100k is chopped off. The recommend no more than 100 links per page, but the recommendation is an estimate of how many links would be on a 100k page. So basically, there is no limit to the number of links on a page - just to the page's filesize.

It's not uncommon for content pages to rank lower than other pages in the site for the content page's target searchterm. For instance, I have great difficulty getting rankings for certain content pages because my home page is so strong (comparitively), and it contains the content page's target searchterm in the text.

It's usually to do with links, and link text (the text that is clicked on). You need to point a number of internal links at the content page, and use the target searchterm in the link text. It would also help *enormously* if you get some links from other sites to the content page, again using the targeted link text.

But before all that, make sure that the content page is well optimized for the target searchterm. You didn't say anything about it, so you may not have done that yet.

[amf123]

Thanks PhilC

For this term, the index page is *very* weak compared to the content page, so content page should be ranked way higher. But it doesn't even show up, as though it's not getting crawled at all. The content page is well-optimized for the term (I believe).

The target search term is in the link on the index page.

It would be impractical for me to garner external links to the content pages because each content page lists the details for a particular upcoming event. There are over 100 new ones each week.

I strongly suspect the content pages are not being crawled at all or are for some reason being crawled and not listed. Have a made a grave error on the content pages that is penalizing them?

Trent

[PhilC]

Have you checked your log file to find out if the pages are being crawled?

Also you can do a site: search to see what pages Google has for the site; e.g:-site:www(dot)domain(dot)com -qwaszx

That -nonsense word is a way of getting Google to show all of the pages that it has for the site.

[Grumpus]

It's most likely going to come down to the fact that things are moving so quickly that by the time Google gets enough data on the new page, it has already moved off the main index page and deeper into the site (or at least far enough down the page where the link isn't being found during a "fresh hit" anymore).

Remember, too, that nowadays, there are LOTS of offpage factors that go into ranking a page. It really takes a new page several months to get it's full ranking power except under very rare circumstances. So, your main page that lists all the new events has all of the "offpage" factors calculated for it, while the new page doesn't. Thus, the index page is outranking the actual page based solely on it's muscle - especially if that's the only way into each of the event pages.

If I were you, I'd create a section called "Newly Added Events" and have a list that sorts by the day you added the event to the database and not the day that it's going to happen. So, a few weeks (or even a month) ahead of time, the spiders can come in and gobble up all the new stuff. Then two weeks (or whatever) later, when the event is on the upcoming event sheet, the SE already has the page indexed and has had some time to work out some of the more complex off-page math on it.

G.