Google won’t index my webpage

Okay, Google – what is UP?

Google won't index my page - Google Logo

Google - You're driving me crazy.

I see you. You visit the page every few days. You’ve got about 43 out of 60 pages indexed. Thanks for those that you DID index. But what those other pages? The web page has great keyword density – I even backed it down a bit – I may HAVE gotten a bit overexuberant initially.  That was corrected 6 weeks ago – and you’ve been back since then.  It’s similar, but substantially DIFFERENT from several other pages that are indexed on my site. My meta tags are all correct,filled properly and uniquely.  The webpage content is of decent length – over 500 words – actually I think it’s a little over 1000 words.  You’ve got some decent copy to read here, little bot.

I’ve put the website on another server. Given it a different IP, a new webhost. GOOGLE SHOW ME SOME LOVE HERE!

Bing has it indexed – and it ranks #1 over there (and thus on Yahoo too), but you my fickle friend, you… What more must I do to get you to index this webpage???  I’ve created backlinks out the wazzoo (within reason of course, even from .EDU domains).  I’ve bookmarked.  I’ve tweeted. I’ve Google +1’d it. I’ve “liked” it.  Now why won’t YOU?

I guess we can try some other things. Maybe if we let you do the site search for me, you might cough up and decide to add these pages in. Of course, I’ve had you FETCH them directly in your handy dandy Webmaster Tools, and you still ignored them.  I’ve changed the URL paths with 301 redirects in place even. Perhaps they were too long for your liking?  WordPress likes to give them nice long descriptive titles (and thus URIs) but still…  They very adequately describe what IS found on the page.

Google, my fickle friend, you drive me crazy. It’s pretty hard to beat the competition on your SERP when I have to do it on the strength of the site and other pages. It is quite a statement though that I actually rank those keywords 3 or 4 on the SERPs for content on the “Contact Us” page alone.  I’ve got my eye on you.  We’ll talk again.

UPDATE:  Yes, Google, you finally chose to show me some love. About a week after this post, you finally opted to properly recognize ALL those pages and everything came up #1’s 🙂  Now THAT’S what I was waiting for.  And my client was getting a bit antsy too LOL.

Author: Eric Erickson

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2 Comments

  1. Hi!
    How did you get Google to index? I have a client who is facing the same problem. I only do some content work for him, so it’s not really my job. But, I have worked with him for a long time so I’d like to help out.

    His pages have been indexed by Bing, but Google just won’t budge. He has done everything that you said you did in your post, but still no luck.

    Any suggestions or advice would be much appreciated,

    Post a Reply
    • Hi Vani! It was for a fairly competitive local term. And there were some pages that were boilerplate content (mentioned those in the post). IMHO, what happens is that Google decides that the content is of lower quality and THEN puts one in the infamous, and hotly debated, “sandbox” – and then it’s a matter of time. Short of getting a viral bit of content on that page, Google just seems to leave you sitting there until it decides to come back on its own. I honestly believe at this time, that probably 90% of my time was wasted working on those pages and that Google would have come back and SERPed them at about the same time anyway. Though with all that work ON those pages, they probably WERE much stronger by the time Google decided to include them. The short answer in my case is, “Time” 🙁

      Still though, I DO see some boilerplate pages from competitive sites popping up large in Google. I’ve gone the route of handwriting EVERY page – even if I am doing 20 local area pages that say roughly the same thing with the only real difference being a city name. Bugs the everloving crap out of me to see that, but really don’t want to go the route of having another site in Google Hell for 3 months by *trying* to go the boilerplate route to save that time.

      Post a Reply

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