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**Big_Dave** · 06-Dec-2006, 09:37 AM

Hi - Do I remember correctly that you had a post recently about Google dropping many of your pages after a major site change? If I'm wrong then please forgive me.

However I moved to Actinic v7 in May, As soon as I did Google indexed every page I created as of the 7th May. From that moment on it has ignored everything else.

My site is now hundreds of pages in size and fairly SEO friendly I believe.

However Google has indexed pages (like my site map for example) but when you view Googles cached version of it, its the version of my sitemap as of the 7th of May!

I can only assume its the dreaded 'Sandbox'.

I assume you may be suffering a similar fate? You may need to wait between 6 and 9 months before Goolge will start to 'trust' your site again.

On occasion Google indexes some of my main pages, they then drop off again after a few days and revert back to the May the 7th versions.

Not sure if this helps but just my experience.

regards
Dave

**Legends** · 06-Dec-2006, 09:59 AM

Originally posted by Big_Dave

I can only assume its the dreaded 'Sandbox'.

On occasion Google indexes some of my main pages, they then drop off again after a few days and revert back to the May the 7th versions.

regards
Dave

Hi Dave

I was under the impression that the sandbox was only for new sites - my site is four years old - admittedly it had face lift while back but the domain stayed the same, what happens when peoiple like amazon have a face lift - do they drop out of the index for 6 to 9 months?

What I cannot understand is the hokey kokey indexing - in for a couple of days then out again.

I really think that google is seeing something it does not like

Cheers

**Big_Dave** · 06-Dec-2006, 10:10 AM

Its annoying and there is no sense to it at all. I too kept the same domain name, i just switched from another shopping cart software to Actinic and therefore the only thing that changed was some page names/paths. Since then I have the same (or similar) problems that you have.

The annoying part about it is that you will spend all your time trying to make your pages search engine friendly, only for Google to behave weird and ignore them

I'm waiting for this mythical 9 months to elapse to see if it makes a difference. One day a page will be in Google, the next day its gone. Most of my pages are ignored.

Annoying to say the least.

**Mike Hughes** · 06-Dec-2006, 10:16 AM

It's not the sandbox as much of the rest of the site is indexed.

Too me it looks as if there just isn't enough unique content on the pages to convince Google it's worth indexing.

Doing a site: search on legends online produces 835 pages or so, but only the first 50 pages or so are in the real index. The rest are supplemental.

It's hard to tell why there are so many supplemental pages. Lots of them just resolve to 404 error pages. If these are product that are no longer available, then why not leave them there, mark the catalog as sold out, and remove any links to the product? At least this way the page will stay in google for a while and can bring in visitors that might want something else you have.

I would also tidy up the content and keywords to only describe what you have on the page. The harry potter wands page has all kinds of references to coins, autographs, movie memorabilia, etc that have nothing to do with the page you're trying to get google to index.

More unique content would also be good. Look at the cached content for some of the pages and the only unique thing on the whole page might be the celebrety's name, such as 'Mike Myers', that only appears once.

Mike

**Legends** · 06-Dec-2006, 11:01 AM

Originally posted by olderscot

It's not the sandbox as much of the rest of the site is indexed.

Doing a site: search on legends online produces 835 pages or so, but only the first 50 pages or so are in the real index. The rest are supplemental.

It's hard to tell why there are so many supplemental pages. Lots of them just resolve to 404 error pages. If these are product that are no longer available, then why not leave them there, mark the catalog as sold out, and remove any links to the product? At least this way the page will stay in google for a while and can bring in visitors that might want something else you have.

Mike

Hi Mike

Thanks for you comments

The supplemental results are all pages from the site before the redesign - when we dropped the acatalog folder - each exisiting page at the time has a 301 redirect to the corresponding new page. There are some pages that that are very old and were dropped by us last year that still appear in the supplemental index even though they have not existed for several months.

It is difficult for us to keep pages once we have sold the items as we are dealing mostly with one off items that cannot be repeated and we would have, by now, thousands of pages with no stock and I am sure this would really work against us as far as keeping the customer happy.

I believe there is more unique content on some of Our pages than there was on our old site, yet that was fully indexed this time last year - now each section and some of the product pages have a fragment at the top that has lots of unique content see the harry potter wands one for example. This fragment is different for each section of our catalogue and the main harry potter wands have their own fragment description. the common bits of the site are css which i believe google now detects and can ignore as far as duplicate/unique content etc is concerned.

We are steadily working on unique fragments for every single page of our site and should be completed shortly.

The Harry potter wands fragments have been there for approx 4 months so I thought google should have seen that by now.

Thanks for your input.

**Mike Hughes** · 06-Dec-2006, 11:21 AM

OK.

I guess you're using actinic to build your links as if they were manually built up then customers would only find the sold out products via google etc and as soon as the got to the site they would only find products that were available. It's a good point though that you don't want to waste customers time once they get to your site as they will quickly leave.

One thing you have to fix is that your 404 error page returns a 302 redirect response followed by a 200 OK response. This is why Google is keeping all the old pages in the supplemental index rather than removing them. You need to set up your server so that the 404 page gives a 404 not found header response.

Google's behaviour definitely sounds like it doesn't like the harry potter wands page and deliberately removes it from the index. I still think the most likely cause is going to be duplicate/not unique content so I would do 3 things to try and fix it:

1. Get rid of all the old pages due to the 404 problem.
2. Remove/reduce duplicate stuff from the key page areas (title, description, keywords)
3. Increase unique content on the page. Use less fluff and more hard description.

Mike

**Legends** · 06-Dec-2006, 11:41 AM

Originally posted by olderscot

OK.

One thing you have to fix is that your 404 error page returns a 302 redirect response followed by a 200 OK response. This is why Google is keeping all the old pages in the supplemental index rather than removing them. You need to set up your server so that the 404 page gives a 404 not found header response.

Hi Mike

Thanks for your comments

Any ideas how I can get my server to respond with the correct 404 info when I am using a customised error page (ie 404 error is redirected to a page on my site) I currently use "ErrorDocument 404 http://www.legends-online.com/Error_Page.html" in my .htaccess file.

I will do some experiments with content etc on specific pages to see if I can get Google to index them.

I think you might have a point with some of the product pages we have.

Cheers

**Mike Hughes** · 06-Dec-2006, 12:40 PM

It appears with Apache that to get a proper 404 response you must enter the error document address relative to the root. Entering a full address causes apache to do a redirect and 200 OK response.

So what you need to use is:

ErrorDocument 404 /Error_Page.html

Mike

**Big_Dave** · 06-Dec-2006, 12:47 PM

Does that mean its a bad idea to put a redirect to your Homepage in your .htaccess file (for a 404 error)?

Should the 404 redirect be to a specific error page at the root of your site?

**Mike Hughes** · 06-Dec-2006, 01:24 PM

Yes, using the homepage as a 404 error page is not a good idea.

The search engines expect to see a 404 page when a webpage doesn't exist and don't want the 404 page to be in the index (as it has no content value).

So presenting the home page as the 404 page risks it being excluded from the index.

Google, and I'm sure the other SEs do this as well, deliberately test non existent urls on a site to see what page is presented as the error page. This tells them what page is used as an error page so they can:

a) remove any webpages from the index that resolve to this error page.

b) remove the error page from the index as an unwanted page.

The SEs might be clever enough to detect when webmasters are doing something wrong with the error page, but I wouldn't take the risk.

The best thing to do is create a unique error with all your usual links etc, but with some text that says somethign along the lines 'page not found, please use the site navigation to find the page you want'.

Mike

PS. The erro page doesn't have to be at the root of the site, but the addressing must be relative to the root. i.e. /error.html is OK as is /acatalog/error.html

**RuralWeb** · 06-Dec-2006, 01:37 PM

Just trying to look at your site but it looks like the server is down

**Legends** · 06-Dec-2006, 01:40 PM

Originally posted by RuralWeb

Just trying to look at your site but it looks like the server is down

Hi Malcolm - its me messing with the HTaccess file and I messed it up - OK now.

Cheers

**RuralWeb** · 06-Dec-2006, 01:47 PM

OK now

No its not!

**Legends** · 06-Dec-2006, 01:58 PM

Originally posted by RuralWeb

No its not!

Hi Malcolm

I can see it OK - anyone else having problems seeing the site?

Cheers

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