Help - Pages removed from Index

[garbageaccount]

Our indexing in Google seems to be going down every single week and it is becoming more and more alarming. Some 300+ pages a week seem to be disappearing from the index. And the same is happening with the site's links even though we have several new backlinks (I realize they will take a while to come into affect because of the 'aging' process) but I don't understand why this is happening.

The site is - www.magazine-supermarket.com

Any help or insights would be greatly appreciated!

[mystic]

maybe your site is getting unpopular according to google. Maybe sites that used to be linking to you are all not linking to you anymore so google doesn't see your site as important anymore and unindex pages.

just my thought.

[garbageaccount]

A lot of links did come down because we ended our affiliate program but I thought that affiliate links didn't count?

[wrmineo]

A few thoughts:

1. The majority of your pages have the same content text below the mag desc ... Google may be reading this as duplicate content, a big slap on the hand according to them.

2. Your code seems to be a mixture of HTML and XHTML resulting in massive errors (over 400) when ran thru W3C on your index page alone.

3. You don't appear to have a robots.txt file in your root domain. Nor does your index page have any metas for robot authorization, index, follow etc.

4. Your error doc redirects to another site, Google may not like that either; should be a message or page on the same domain if possible IMO.

5. Although Google does not weight your keyword metas it still reads them just like comment tags and you could be getting slapped for keyword spam.

[garbageaccount]

1. The majority of your pages have the same content text below the mag desc ... Google may be reading this as duplicate content, a big slap on the hand according to them.

Hmmm could be I never really thought of it because it is general information about all of our products there for the Customer.

2. Your code seems to be a mixture of HTML and XHTML resulting in massive errors (over 400) when ran thru W3C on your index page alone.

Could you give me an example? We recently made some edits to the site taking out a lot of our 'comments' because my spider program was showing massive errors around them and I was afraid this might be part of the problem.

3. You don't appear to have a robots.txt file in your root domain. Nor does your index page have any metas for robot authorization, index, follow etc.

This is a strange thing, there was a robot follow command in there before but I took it out over a month ago because it kept sending the bots not to the Magazine-Supermarket.com index but to the Bluedolphin-Magazines.com index. And I thought for sure this was spamming and going to get us seen as duplicate content.

4. Your error doc redirects to another site, Google may not like that either; should be a message or page on the same domain if possible IMO.

Do you mean it redirects to BlueDolphin-Magazines.com? can you tell me how I can change this because the IT guys here have no clue why it does that.

5. Although Google does not weight your keyword metas it still reads them just like comment tags and you could be getting slapped for keyword spam.

Should I remove the comment tags with the extra keywords and just go with the keyword meta-tags. I'd really never used the comment tags before but someone else suggested they might be helpful because of the category keywords to go with each specific product.

Thanks for the insights this gives me something to look at.


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[wrmineo]

FIRST, IT guys meaning Information Technology? Get some WEB folks, not just computer folks, to work/help on your site.

Secondly, check with your webhost about the redirect for errors. They may have an easy fix via their control panel that you can self-manage, or get your WEB (not IT) guys to modify you htaccess files. ALSO, check to see if your site is on a dedicated or shared IP, that might be some of the issue with the redirect and the robots index,follow problem.

I think you were smart to remove any unnecessary comment tages. Your keyword meta should be concise and relevant; find about 5 (no more than 10) quality keywords/phrases that are relevant to your content and go with that - not a bunch of words you'd like to get hits for, but keywords/phrase that you WILL get hits for because they're contained in your title, content, etc.

Comment tags with keyword rich content may work getting you high rankings in some SE's but get you a free ticket to the back of the line in many others.

As far as what I'd be concerned about viewing as duplicate content at the bottom of your pages, check with some other geeks and get their feel; they may disagree or be able to better advise you how to handle it - maybe have a "Why Customers Love Us" java link like your sitemap and other internal info links.

Good Luck ~ Happy Surfing!

[garbageaccount]

Great! Thanks for the input I'll see what we can do on these.

[wrmineo]

Sorry, you'd asked what I meant by your code and I forgot to point out:

Some of your code ends like normal html which is cool because your doctype states html. However, some of your tags end with xhtml code />

Run the site through W3C and/or check out an html tidy service that will probably validate, clean and shorten your code for better indexing.