How can Google index a page that it can't crawl completely?

[danatanseo]

I recently posted a question regarding a product page that appeared to have no content. [http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-is-ose-showing-now-data-for-this-url]

What puzzles me is that this page got indexed anyway. Was it indexed based on Google knowing that there was once content on the page? Was it indexed based on the trust level of our root domain?

What are your thoughts? I'm asking not only because I don't know the answer, but because I know the argument is going to be made that if Google indexed the page then it must have been crawlable...therefore we didn't really have a crawlability problem.

Why Google index a page it can't crawl?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Yep. If you had links to that page from other authority pages, the pagerank/authority would transfer over, even with the indexing issue.

[danatanseo]

Awesome explanation Oleg. We had some other product pages (128) to be exact, that fell victim to the same coding error. I found it interesting that not only were most of them indexed, some of them actually had PageAuthority and or PageRank.

I am thinking Google may have allocated authority to some of these product pages because they had decent link profiles, despite Googlebot not being able to access the whole page. Is that possible?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

It has crawled and indexed the page - check out the cached copy.

If you view the source, you can see that there is some HTML code but it seems to get cut off prematurely (perhaps due to a coding error). But that HTML code was enough to get the page indexed, but I would be suprised to see if it ranks for any terms. i.e. a search for the pages title does not return the correct url - "Shure SLX24/SM58 | Wireless Microphone System - CCI Solutions"

So G recognizes a page is there but see's think's it is blank - which is why it is indexed but won't rank for anything.