Some weeks back I added several pages to my site as a means to add value. Strictly informative content, though with targeted keywords. These pages are already well-ranked by google, considering how new they are and their humble origin.
The problem is that google refuses to index one of these pages. This page is not listed as an internal link by webmaster tools and when I try to “find internal link” I get “no data is available.” I’ve tried “Fetch as Googlebot” successfully, but this still has not resulted in the page being indexed.
At the same time that I added these pages, I renamed another page to a newly-targeted keyword, and I’m having the same problems with this page. I cannot get google to remove the old version off the internal links list and add the new version, and it’s not coming up in search results, though the old version was doing OK.
I’ve checked and triple-checked my sitemap and tried submitting the URL’s individually.
Have you used a <link rel=“canonical”> in the page head? If that’s still set to use the old URL then that would explain the problem.
If it isn’t that, feel free to give us the URL of the page that is stubbornly refusing to appear on Google and we’ll get in there and scrutinise it with an intense scrute.
No, I haven’t since this is the first I’ve heard of such a thing.
I can see how this might have been an issue in the beginning with the re-named page (from http://www.drumdr.com/hand-drum.html to http://www.drumdr.com/hand-drums.html), since much of the content remained the same. But now, I’m pretty sure Google has cleared its cache of the old version. It just won’t acknowledge the new one.
Google is finding both of those pages now. To check if a page is indexed, the easiest ways are (i) copy a sentence from the page and paste it into Google in “quotes” so you get an exact phrase search, or (ii) if you’re looking for several pages on the same (fairly small) domain, type site:example.com into Google and you’ll get all pages it has listed.
Now maybe those pages aren’t ranking as well as you would like, but that’s a different problem!
Thank you for bringing redirection to my attention. I’m learning as I go, and this is definitely a topic I need to be familiar with. After a quick browse of the topic, I’m thinking I’ll probably end up going with 301, since there’s a couple of incoming links to the old page.
Your’e right. The search site:www.drumdr.com returns every single current page on my site and no other.
I guess webmaster tools can take weeks to update, because it currently lists both www.drumdr.com/hand-drum.html AND www.drumdr.com/hand-drums.html as internal links. At the same time, www.drumdr.com/middle-eastern-hand-drums.html is not listed as an internal link. When I try to ‘find’ it, webmaster tools tells me there’s no data. It’s especially odd to me, because I published that page and its two sister pages within a week of each other, and I’ve had no issues with the other two pages.
Guess I’ll just have to give it a bit more time and see what happens.