Google not showing any of our listings??

[Tim_A]

Hi all,

Our classifieds site is up and running, but there's a problem we're having with Google which is confusing me.

We have roughly 770 adverts which aren't showing up if googled. For instance you can copy the title of the advert, or some of the text into Google and it won't come up at all. Some of the adverts are nearly a year old.

We've created a sitemap and submitted it, and if you search for the URL string (id number etc.), the listing is there (so google has indexed the listings).

The only page that really comes up in google is the homepage, and any additional pages we have 'made'.

Obviously this is pretty frustrating, so we're wondering if perhaps we've missed something, or if there's more we can do?

Any help as always appreciated

[bowers01]

Do a search of site:yourdomain.com and see how many results come up?
Nick

[Tim_A]

Hi

Cheers for the reply. We've already done that, and there are 37 pages listed for us, so the adverts are there... we just can't seem to bring them up via text searches etc.

If we type in the direct url such as mysite.com/viewlisting.php?view=827 we can find the listing, but the title, description etc don't seem to respond?

[Lhotch]

Since the inner workings of google are a mystery and constantly changing I cant imagin you will get the answer here. Your ads have abviously been cataloged by google so they are in there as to why a text search doesnt find them is something you would have to ask google.

[SecondShoe]

Google needs around 5 days to index the new ads from my 4.0.9. I guess if I set a higher Google crawl rate it will be faster.
Maybe you've done some modifications that prevent Google from indexing your titles.

[seymourjames]

This may not be the problem but it may have something to do with it.

Google makes judgements about importance if it sees what it considers to be duplicate or near duplicate pages. The question is what is nearly duplicate.

This can be a problem with any template based system. Secondly, Google clearly prefers unique page titles and descriptions - more over information used in title tags which reside in the links to those pages. If there are few links to a page and the links are poorly referenced (i.e. just plainly called without title tags and not in much context) it is likely to be considered not so important (both internal links and external links). All my pages are unique by design down to alt tags on images in the layout template and I have no problem with google indexing every single advert as they are clearly unique. In addition, each page is being referenced from complete links.

I bet if you took an advert from your site and got a link to it from another site in context, you would find that google would make more of an effort so to speak.

[Tim_A]

Thanks for the replies guys...

I've been doing a lot of research on this and the 'duplicate pages' issue comes up a lot so that will be my next plan of attack.

I'l be revising my titles, keywords and descriptions for each page.

Out of interest, there's no way to give each category a unique Meta-description which I think would help a great deal.

I've found some possible solutions to this by searching this forum, but would like a complete solution if anyone has one? Could I just call the category description set in 'category.php' into the meta-data? Or even use the 'Short Description' in the meta-description of an advert?

Any help as always gratefully received.

Tim

p.s. it might be worth mentioning i DO NOT have the SEO mod

[bowers01]

Originally Posted by Tim_A

Out of interest, there's no way to give each category a unique Meta-description which I think would help a great deal.

just use {sitetitle} in the meta tages, its always different for the categories.
Nick

[SkGold]

Originally Posted by Tim_A

We have roughly 770 adverts which aren't showing up if googled. For instance you can copy the title of the advert, or some of the text into Google and it won't come up at all. Some of the adverts are nearly a year old.

Could be many reasons. I can do a quick look if you want. What is your site URL? and let me know what adverts are nearly a year old? PM me if you don�t want to post here.

Regarding meta-description I am not sure if it will work for V4 (I still don�t have time to try this version) but in V3.1 I used something like this.

<meta name="Description" content="{if $shortdescription} {$shortdescription}
{elseif $SCRIPT_NAME== '/category.php'} bla bla bla {$title} bla bla bla {$title}
{else} {$sitedescription} {/if}"

[CHRD]

IN 3.10, I all ways use at least 4 different layout temps to manage the header data
You will have much more control on what gets displayed in there.

make backup of the main temp file rename the and upload the in the same folder as you layout file

/public_html/mysitename/templates/default

Go to /public_html/category.php open it up to edit

at the bottom of the file you will see the call for the layout file

$class_tpl->display('layout.tpl.php');

Edit it to call your new layout, like

$class_tpl->display('layoutXXXX.tpl.php');