Invisible Yet Indexed to Google

[mikefromvt]

Hi.

We have a large site (in excess of 6K pages). We know that Google has indexed all pages as a page rank shows up for our key indices (each one is located behind index.html). This last weekend, I was pleasantly surprised to note that Google had served an index page from our site in response to a query for a relevant key word phrase. Of course, each index page is designed to collect products that we sell specific to the item category; accordingly, if Google consistently served results from our index pages our rankings would be higher for each respective category as was the case over the weekend (we moved from 20-30 to anywhere in the 10 ten/first results page). Mysteriously, come Monday morning, Google reverted to the "old" index, only serving pages from our index.html page. Of course, our rankings reverted back to pages 4-5-6, etc.

Also, we are in an extremely competitive retail market. Rankings change daily and, occasionally, intraday.

Anyone else experience this? Any ideas as to why this arbitrary inclusion/removal of back pages is happening? How to correct?

Thanks

Mike

[tamecrow]

I'm confused as to what you mean. You say Google is only serving 'pages' from your index.html 'page'. This doesn't seem to make any sense.

If you're referring to your positions changing over the weekend and then reverting back to how they were, that's quite normal. The search index goes through fluctuations. It's quite probably nothing to do with any changes you made on your site - it could be Google testing a new filter or part of the alogirithm. Alternatively, you may have hit a different data center. Without more specific information, it really is hard to say.

[chiron]

I think he meant indices in terms of subfolders, e.g. served from /pants or /coats and is calling these subdirectories an index. Apologies if I am wrong there Mike.

[mikefromvt]

Hi.

As to Tamecrow's comment, I meant that Google was matching key words (not serving up pages, sorry) from a product index page below the home page for the site. This matching key words from a product index page is precisely what we would like to see happen as the URL names for each of the indices are derived from keywords.

I assumed that lower page rank for each of the indices lead Google NOT to return results from the indices pages. We are considering a Press Release campaign (SEO Optimized) to push higher ranked sites to publish the links to the indices and therefore improve Page rank with the result that Google will publish results from each of the indexes.

Chiron is correct that the indices are like "pants" "coats" with a listing of manufacturers on each page.

BTW, the site is entirely comprised of static pages.

[incrediblehelp]

This post might help:

Google Rankings Change From Day to Day, Hour To Hour, Why?

[nacworld]

I have also a large site about 25000 links, checked from my sitemap, but google only indexed my 5000-6000 links, and it changes every day - week, it sometimes increase and sometimes decrease, well it s really hard to catch up with it... and to get found in google searches, do not forget to use google webmaster stuff...