Help, a certain directory is not being indexed

[ziller]

Before I start, dont expect this to be too easy. This really has me puzzled and am surprised I am still yet to find a solution for it. Get ready.

We have a wordpress website, launched over 6 months ago and have never had an issue getting content such as pages and post pages and categories indexed. However, I some what recently (about 2 months ago) installed a directory plugin (Business Directory Plugin) which lists businesses via unique urls that are accesible from a sub folder. Its these business listings that I absolutely cannot get indexed.

The index page to the directory which links to the business pages is indexed, however for some reason google is not indexing all the listing pages which are linked to from this page. Its not an issue of the content being uncrawlable or at least dont think so as when I run crawlers on my site such as xml sitemap crawlers it finds all the pages including the directory pages so I am sure its not an issue of the search engines not finding the content.

I have created xml sitemaps and uploaded to webmaster tools, tools recongises that there are many pages in the xml sitemap but google continues to only index a small percentage (everything but my business listings).

The directory has been there for about 8 weeks now so I know there is a issue as it should of been indexed by now.

See our main website at www.smashrepairbid.com.au and the business directory index page at www.smashrepairbid.com.au/our-shops/

To throw in a curve ball, in looking into this issue and setting up tools we noticed a lot of 404 error pages (nearly 4,000). We were very confused where these were coming from as they were only being generated from search engines - humans could not access the 404s and so we are guessing se's were firing some javascript code to generate them or something else weird. We could see the 404s in the logs so we know they were legit but again feel it was only search engines, this was validated when we added some rules to robots.txt and we saw the errors in the logs stop. We put the rules in robots txt file to try and stop google from indexing the 404 pages as we could not find anyway to fix the site / code (no idea what is causing them). If you do a site search in google you will see all the pages that are omitted in the results.

Since adding the rules to robots, our impressions shown through tools have jumped right up (increased by 5 times) so thought this was a good indication of improvement but still not getting the results we want.

Does anyone have any clue whats going on or why google and other se's are not indexing this content? Any help would be greatly appreciated and if you need any other information to assist just ask me.

Really appreciate anyone who can spare their time to help me, I sure do need it.

Thanks.

[ziller]

OK issue resolved!

Lynn thank you - was the relative url in the canonical tag that played havoc  Changing it to absolute is now causing the pages to be indexed.

Lesson learnt.

[ziller]

Hey Kane,

The /shops url was a old url that had a directory in it. We blocked it in the robots as it was generating tons of 404 errors. In webmaster tools we can see thousands of 404 errors within that directory so we deleted it all and tried to block se's from throwing the errors (like i described in initial post).

A number of those listing do have very little information however there are a bunch that do have great content which is why I am not sure if that is the case. I will keep an eye on this though and also check about the logs and let you know what that says.

[ziller]

Thanks Lynn.

I have taken on your recommendation and changed the canonical tag to be absolute. Thanks for your help we will see how it goes.

[KaneJamison]

As Lynn said, relative canonical tags could absolutely cause issues. That said, I'm seeing absolute URLs in the canonical tag now, so you may have fixed that in the past few days.

Also, I do see the Our Shops pages indexed when I search for site:smashrepairbid.com.au, but I don't see any other pages in the /our-shops/ directory aside from www.smashrepairbid.com.au/our-shops/?action=search

Your robots.txt is currently blocking /shops/. I don't think that would cause an issue but would be nice to remove that if it's not needed...

There's almost zero content on the pages I glanced at, eg. http://www.smashrepairbid.com.au/our-shops/1263/bakker-towing/ and http://www.smashrepairbid.com.au/our-shops/1616/coastal-towing-service/. When you look at it from Google's perspective, there's very little value being added by these pages. No unique photos, no phone number, no website, etc. There's a million local business scrapers that have more content than this, so why should they bother indexing these pages?

Try pulling up your logs and seeing if these URLs have been requested by Google's spiders. Here's a good guide from Ian Lurie on how to do that in Excel: http://www.portent.com/blog/analytics/how-to-read-a-web-site-log-file.htm

If the spiders are crawling those shop URLs but aren't indexing them, I think the first thing to do is add way more content to the pages.

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Trent,

Having a quick look I saw that you have relative urls in your canonical tag and this could be problematic. I think it would be worth making those urls absolute to avoid any confusion on Google's part in determining what page or page version should be indexed.

Cannot say for sure if this is the problem, but worth looking into.

Hope that helps!