8345 pages but only 288 pages indexed. What the ????

[watto]

My site Businesses for Sale - Buy & Sell Australian Business for Sale has over 8000 page urls but only 288 are indexed by google. I must be leaking heaps of pr and I am open to suggestion on how I can fix this.

All help is greatly appreciated.

Regards

watto

[incrediblehelp]

Its all about the internal linking being as flat as possible and having deep external linking.

[watto]

When you say 'flat' internal linking, what exactly do you mean?

Regards

watto

[inertia]

What sort of pages arent indexed?

[Steven1976a]

Hi Incredible,

Im also interested in what you mean by

"internal linking being as flat as possible and having deep external linking"

Ive not been in forum for a while so if you could give an explanation or put me on to a link I would appreciate it.

When I do a site search in google site:Businesses for Sale - Buy & Sell Australian Business for Sale it says you have 4080 pages in their index so i would imagine they just see most of the generated pages from your database as duplicate pages. I would imagine most of the listing pages have the same shell to them with very similar information therefore they only show the top level links which are probably 1/2 clicks in from the homepage which is 288 pages.

Im not sure if this is the answer but this is what we see with our jewelry site. The question is, how do you make the pages beyond that fresh with relevant fresh content??

[activeco]

I see 4330 pages in Google.

[incrediblehelp]

The fact is the farther away FIRST links are from your home page the less chance they have of delivering the appropriate internal juice and spidering they will need to get ranked. What I mean by FIRST links are first links spiders see of your lower level product/services pages.

So if you create this large website and FIRST link out to a product or service page 3-4-5 levels deep that page will probably have issues getting ranked, unless you have some solid internal cross linking going on to that page.

For instance let’s look at this in breadcrumb form to understand it. If I have a website directory of a car parts:

Jaan's Car Parts

Which is better

Jaan's Car Parts > Ford Truck Tail Lights
In this case we FIRST link from the home page to the specific Ford tail light page

or

Jaan's Car Parts > Trucks > Ford > Parts > Lights > Ford Truck Tail Lights
Where we now FIRST link to the Ford tail light page 4 levels deep!!

Obviously for the search engines option one is better, but it is simply not possible from a usability stand point. Look at this article:

http://www.audettemedia.com/blog/seo...n-architecture

Review the “Optimized IA: Sections & Categories” section. The bottom line if the less links you have from the home page to the "money” pages the better off you are from user and spider stand point.

Now understand what is being suggested here has nothing to do with how many folder deep content is. Having content 7 folders deep can rank fine as long as your internal linking to the page is strong.