Why will google not index my pages?

[Towelsrus]

About 6 weeks ago we moved a subcategory out to becomne a main category using all the same content. We also removed 100's of old products and replaced these with new variation listings to remove duplicate content issues.

The problem is google will not index 12 critcal pages and our ranking have slumped for the keywords in the categories.

What can i do to entice google to index these pages?

[Towelsrus]

In google webmaster tools the sitemaps report 14 urls in our category listings not indexed. However, I have had trouble identifying which urls it is

[AdeLewis]

It looks like that page and the category pages have been indexed:-

site:towelsrus.co.uk/Towels/Hand-Towels/prodlist_ct472.htm
site:towelsrus.co.uk/Towels/Face-Cloths-And-Flannels/prodlist_ct471.htm
site:towelsrus.co.uk/Towels/catlist_fnct561.htm

The cache view of the above pages is the same as the current versions of the pages on your site.

Are you confusing pages not being indexed with pages not ranking?

[Towelsrus]

Ok, I think the fatal mistake made is that these category pages are identical to those which it replaced and those origional pages I guess have not been removed from Googles Index.

How do I get out of this hole and get these critcal pages indexed? Would fetching as google bot do anything realistically?

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

You cant entice them.....you can make sure they get indexed properly.

Make sure they are being crawled and their are no errors on the page. (no duplicate title tags, etc.) You can do this with the campaign tool in SEOMOZ.

Make sure you build your site with a logical link structure as each page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

Make sure that your sitemap has them listed correctly.

Make sure they are original content and not duplicated somewhere else on the internet or on another of your sites.

This should get you in good shape. Hope this helps.

Mark

[David_H]

Fraser, one thing you can try (if you haven't already) is to use the "Fetch as Google" feature in webmaster tools.

Once you've entered the url of your page, and Google retrieves the data, you have the option to then submit that url to the index.

I've done this a couple of times and it seems to work - of course, Google might have been ready to index the pages anyway, but who knows!

[Towelsrus]

Yes, there is 12 pages within this category. All category pages

http://www.towelsrus.co.uk/Towels/catlist_fnct561.htm

[AdeLewis]

Hi Fraser,

Do you have a link to one of the pages?