Struggling to get my lyrics website fully indexed

[SEOed]

Hey guys, been a longtime SEOmoz user, only just getting heavily into SEO now and this is my first query, apologies if it's simple to answer but I have been doing my research!

My website is http://www.lyricstatus.com - basically it's a lyrics website.

Rightly or wrongly, I'm using Google Custom Search Engine on my website for search, as well as jQuery auto-suggest - please ignore the latter for now.

My problem is that when I launched the site I had a complex AJAX Browse page, so Google couldn't see static links to all my pages, thus it only indexed certain pages that did have static links. This led to my searches on my site using the Google CSE being useless as very few pages were indexed.

I've since dropped the complex AJAX links and replaced it with easy static links. However, this was a few weeks ago now and still Google won't fully index my site. Try doing a search for "Justin Timberlake" (don't use the auto-suggest, just click the "Search" button) and it's clear that the site still hasn't been fully indexed!

I'm really not too sure what else to do, other than wait and hope, which doesn't seem like a very proactive thing to do! My only other suspicion is that Google sees my site as more duplicate content, but surely it must be ok with indexing multiple lyrics sites since there are plenty of different ones ranking in Google.

Any help or advice greatly appreciated guys!

[Fubra]

You need more unique content. Your site is great I like it much btter then the other lyic sites.

but I can't see any content at all you have written yourself.

[EGOL]

I agree with Stephen.  Tons of lyrics websites out there.

If you want to get your site more visible write a couple to a few hundred words about each song and post it on the pages above or beside the lyrics.  Then you will have something unique.

Try that on a couple dozen pages to see what happens.  Give it a few months.

[firstconversion]

You have exactly the same content as a million other lyrics websites, so why should Google be interested in your PR0, PA18, DA2 website?

I think your doing pretty good with 15000 pages indexed via site:http://lyricstatus.com

I think what you need is a USP, not technical seo responses

[RyanKent]

Do you have any organization to your site? I can see where some visitors would desire to find lyrics by year, singer, music style (jazz, rock, etc), music type (love songs, happy songs, etc) and so forth.

Even if users found songs by searching, crawlers move through your site through links. Unless your site is extremely well linked and has a great navigation system, you are only going to see a relatively small percentage of your site indexed.

[SEOed]

Wow, that was a quick response, thanks so much Ryan!

With regards to Google WMT, yep done that as soon as I went live, and I did try and make a sitemap using xml-sitemaps.org's tool, but where I have 700,000+ songs, the XML sitemap generator kept stalling due to lack of RAM. I did upload a partial sitemap though, but to date the "URLs in web index" is stuck at 363... out of 700,000+!!

You're right, I don't have a nav as I believe users will just use the search, but there is a "Browse" link in the footer which appears on every page, and this is effectively my Site Map: http://www.lyricstatus.com/browse

So as far as I'm concerned there is a static link path to every page in my website, correct me if I'm wrong?

Good point in your last para about a unique couple hundred words on each page - tall order for 700k pages, but could definitely do that for key songs that I want to get ranked for. Thanks again Ryan!

[RyanKent]

Hi Ed.

A few things you can do to help get your pages indexed:

1. If you have not done so already, register with Google and go to the Google Webmaster Tools page http://www.google.com/webmasters

2. If you have not already done so, create a XML sitemap. Ideally it should be located at http://www.lyricstatus.com/sitemap

3. If you want to locate the sitemap anywhere else, you will need to create a robots.txt file and place the sitemap URL in the file. I noticed you didn't have a robots.txt file. You can learn more about them at robotstxt.org.

4. In Google WMT, go ahead and upload your sitemap (Site Configuration > Sitemap). Then check back a day later. What you want to look at is two fields: URLs submitted and URLs in index. Your goal would be to have all your URLs in the index, but that isn't realistic without a lot of work.

5. Another thing you can do is create a HTML sitemap and place a link in the footer of your home page. You don't offer site navigation so a HTML sitemap can help visitors navigate your site.

Take these steps for now and then you will have a much better idea where your site stands. You can then match up your URLs in the sitemap with the URLs in Google's index. The urls without a match are the pages you need to get into the index.

You can try link building or even placing links to these buried pages on your home page to help get them indexed.

One last note concerning duplicate content. You really should consider adding original content to the pages to help them not be considered duplicate content. Keep in mind the page is viewed as a whole so if you have a song, you probably need to write at least a couple hundred words to differentiate your pages from all the other similar pages on the web.

Good luck.