pages disappearing from google

jimmybeige

Hi,
I put my website up online about a month ago. Google started picking up pages and some of them rose reasonably high for certain search terms but some have now disappeared for no apparent reason.

For example this page was indexed but has now totally disappeared:
http://www.myhobby.ie/pool-snooker-darts/wexford/darts/wexford-darts.htm

I'm not sure why this would happen? I don't think I'm breaking any search engine rules here. There are a number of other pages that have had the same thing happen to them.

Any ideas? Any help greatly appreciated!

worc

Have they "disappeared" or just fallen down in search pages?

Iif you go to google and type (without quotations marks)

"site:myhobby.ie/pool-snooker-darts/wexford"

that page you're saying isn't being indexed is at the bottom, so Google knows it exists. It's possible that your pages have just fallen in the ranks but haven't "disappeared".

This could be for loads of reasons - all too many to put in a post. Maybe to do with not having any content on that page and just "Wexford Darts" so you're competing with other sites that have content (though had a quick look at your competition for that term and they have terrible websites so maybe other reasons).

I notice that I can get to your site putting in both "http://myhobby.ie" and "http://www.myhobby.ie" - you might be getting done in for canonicalization - see this post by Matt Cutts - because your site might change in content regularily with people signing up it might be creating a sense that you have duplicate content and are a spammy site.

You have google site verification up so presume you might have signed up to Google Webmaster Tools (if not then go do that) go in there and under "site configuration" go to "settings" and you'll see on option to choose which one you want either "myhobby.ie" or "www.myhobby.ie" which might help.

No idea of your knowledge of websites but have a watch of this and see if it helps you progress.

jimmybeige

thanks for the feedback worc. Yea I guess that page is still up, although I had trouble finding it.

A few other pages have definitely disappeared. I have a page for the bundoran golf club that was showing up on the fist page of results for that term. It has now disappeared though.

I will look into that canonical issue. Possibly affecting it alright. I don't know what else would be though.

bhickey

jimmybeige wrote: »

A few other pages have definitely disappeared. I have a page for the bundoran golf club that was showing up on the fist page of results for that term. It has now disappeared though.

It hasn't disappeared, you'd see that it has simply dropped to about #53 in the rankings if you were bothered to look.

jimmybeige

Thanks bhickey,
I have bothered to look and the page I am speaking of is not at #53 in the page rankings. If it's the page http://www.myhobby.ie/bundoran-golf-club you are referring to then that is not the page that has disappeared. It's the page http://www.myhobby.ie/golf/donegal/golf/bundoran-golf-club.htm which was showing until this week.

bhickey

Okay well that page might have fallen because Google has realised that the content is identical to some of the content on other websites, for example this . You could try rewriting the content on these pages so that they don't end up being duplicates of content from other sites.

jimmybeige

OK thanks for that. I will look into it. Lots of the content is user generated so I can't edit it, but any I did myself I guess I can make sure it's not a duplicate.

blue4ever

jimmybeige,

I'd reckon you have about 60 pages listed (indexed) before the the 'omitted' pages kick in. I'd say you've around 190 pages indexed at this point in total.

But, you have 2,160 pages in your sitemap -so.... there has to be a problem as they are not being indexed too quickly. By the looks of things pages are being indexed at about one every 5 days of late

The thing is, you have pages with zero content - no information to the end user.

Google has now realised that the energy and time its using to crawl and index your site is, perhaps, a little futile as you provide (in overall terms) no information to the end user and that information can be got elsewhere - thus you are ranking low (didn't do anything looking at rankings).

That i'd see at your greatest problem - you have to populate your site with information - worry about the duplication side later. I suffer for the same thing on a site as users generate their own content - what can ya do!

C

jimmybeige

Thanks for that blue4ever,
yea i should definitely put some effort into that alright. I've not fully finished the site so didn't have much time to populate, but I guess based on this that I should get moving with that aspect.

blue4ever

Jimmy:

If your not finished - just do an "no index" meta in the pages for the time being or block through your robots file - you can still make the pages available, but not have them indexed until your happy with them.

C