Google Indexing Issues

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rdevarona
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Google Indexing Issues

Post by rdevarona » Tue Mar 04, 2008 6:41 am

Hi all,

I've got another one of those issues that's making me scratch my head quite a bit. Our site has been live over a month now and I've submitted my sitemap to Google several times, but Google has yet to crawl anything other than the static pages and every single search result page. They have not indexed any category or product pages. This is very strange given that the category and product pages are by far much better index bait than the rest of the pages.

I'm fairly sure that the cookie issues that we had earlier were partly to blame for this. In the first couple of weeks after going to AC7, google reported "500 internal server errors" on all product and category pages. AC provided a patched commercebuilder file that trapped that issue, but now we get a message that some urls in our sitemap lead to too many redirects.

I just recently looked into the sitemap file and found that all the urls were being created with https instead of http. This doesn't hurt anything, but if you have a valid certificate and have SSL turned on in AC, AC will redirect all product and category pages from https to http. I think this is where the problem is occurring.

My question is this: without making any changes to your sitemap file, have you had success with Google indexing your product and category pages?

Regards,

rdv

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batmike
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Post by batmike » Tue Mar 04, 2008 7:34 am

I just noticed that my sitemap does the exact same thing ... all https redirects and Google doesn't seem to like the bouncing around ...

rdevarona
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Post by rdevarona » Tue Mar 04, 2008 8:19 am

The quick fix is to do a search and replace of all references to "https:" and change them to "http:" in your favorite text editor.

Another quick tip to find out how Google has indexed your site is to type "site:www.YOURDOMAIN.com" in Google. I noticed that Google has indexed all of our Search pages, which is great, but the Title of all of those pages is "Search." These pages don't offer nearly as much detail as the individual product or category pages do.

rdv

Will
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Post by Will » Tue Mar 04, 2008 8:21 am

I've had similar problems with Google indexing. Changed https to http, but they still have only indexed 19 pages out of ~120. Problem is you have to keep waiting for their indexing.

rdevarona
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Post by rdevarona » Tue Mar 04, 2008 8:24 am

I've got 11 pages indexed out of 1,587 in the sitemap. The total number of pages in search results is higher due to the Google going through all the product finder text links.

DonAshby
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Post by DonAshby » Tue Mar 04, 2008 3:48 pm

Hi Everyone,

Are you guys building a brand new site or moving an existing site over? Remember, if you are moving a site, the old URLs will still be out there and you can take advantage of that with a 301 permanent redirect that will immediately redirect anyone who comes to the old Google URL and send them to the new Google AC URL and then even better - Googe will update your index for you quickly. We did this in DEC and had no delays at all. Plus we saved all the old indexes that would still be there.

On the Site Map Upload,,, is everyone taking the AC file, cleaning it up, and then adding your custom pages to the list of URLs. Is there a better way to do this. We do need the Site Map feature going forward as we dont want to wait for crawls and the 301 redirect was a one time thing.

Thanks Don :?:

Will
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Post by Will » Wed Mar 05, 2008 9:57 am

On the Site Map Upload,,, is everyone taking the AC file, cleaning it up, and then adding your custom pages to the list of URLs. Is there a better way to do this.
Don, that's exactly what we're doing right now. Every new page we add we add to the site map manually. I'd have to say uploading the site map didn't seem to speed up the indexing at all.

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