Is Google Hiding Your Pages?
500 words |
Ever wondered why you don't see all the pages of your site when you issue the site: command in Google?
According to the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog, your search engine ranking results are not affected:
Our goal is to provide useful results to the searcher. However, with a site: command, searchers are likely looking for a full list of results from that site, so we are making a change to do that. In some cases, a site: search doesn't show a full list of results even when the pages are different, and we are resolving that issue as well. Note that this is a display issue only and doesn't in any way affect search rankings.
Why would Google think that two different pages in your site look the same? They might have the same (or closely similar) title and description.
You'll end up with pages having the same description if you have the same meta description in those pages. The solution: Get rid of the meta description tag in the HEAD section of your web pages, or use unique meta descriptions.
For those of you who are experiencing this issue, do you really believe that the rankings of these "duplicate" pages are not affected, and that this is all just a "display" issue? I dunno. I've seen sites whose inner pages do not appear in the first page of the SERPs, even if the content is useful. We'll see what happens now that the meta description tags in those pages have been adjusted.
Here's an exercise you can try. Let's say your site is called www.manuelviloria.com
Type the following in the Google search box:
site:www.manuelviloria.com
Go to the last page of search engine results, then scroll down to the bottom of the screen. You might find something that looks like this:
In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 171 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.
Compare the results shown, with the number shown in the first page of the search results. True, it's just a "display" issue and your pages are still there. Come to think of it, however, searchers will only find the you can repeat the search with the omitted results included link only if they reach the last page of the search engine results.
In other words, those other pages of yours will remain hidden to most people. Let's hope Google is able to make those needed changes soon.
The lesson? Choose your web page titles carefully (avoid Same Title Part 1, Same Title Part 2), and use meta description tags properly.
(Hello to Dr. Clevens, a Melbourne plastic surgeon.)
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"Is Google Hiding Your Pages?"
First Posted: March 3, 2007 | Filed in: SEO
Very useful article, thanks. It makes a nice change to have a factual post to read instead of the waffle that seems to be the norm. Thanks again.
Annie (UK)