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Just as an update to this question, I submitted XML sitemaps directly to the blog articles and those pages are still not showing in the Google SERPs. It seems that new pages are discovered quite quickly (as per Google Alerts) but are then dropped from the index within a day or so.

The only pages which are returned consistently are links to the page which allows comments to be added.

The links which were initially identified as broken, were not actually broken so there was nothing to fix there.

Next step I can think of is to attempt some page sculpting by setting a noindex on the comments pages...

If anyone has any more thoughts or ideas, I'd appreciate your input

Great - thanks for your help

I resubmitted the sitemap for the blog in GWT and no errors were found...

I have to say I am v surprised at the number of dead links - we don't have that many blog posts so unless this is indicating content on our main site (where the pages are still .  Even then, as I mentioned to Alan, the only missing content Google Webmaster Tools picks up on is where event tracking is used and it thinks the label is a link.... I did ask Google about these erroneous missing page and they said there was nothing that can be done to indicate they're not meant to be pages and that it would not affect the site's quality.

BTW, An article we published a few hours ago is now showing up in the Google results so it does seem like the rest of the pages have been penalised

Time to figure out what's going on with the missing pages...

Thanks, Irving

Thanks Alan, have DM'ed you.

39 no-index pages on the blog could be correct with the category pages.

I'm quite surprised at the number of broken links - is this specific to /blog and are they actual links? GWT usually picks up event tracking as broken links...

Good point about the homepage - I should get a canonical tag on that...

Thanks!

The blog homepage is http://www.abcam.com/blog

@Alan: The rest of the site is indexable, just the the blog area where noindex has been used (the blog homepage and category pages are auto-generated and repeat a lot of the content in the articles)

@Shailendra: Yes, they were indexed - the last Google Alert which specifically highlights content from the blog is mid-June.

We have a blog on our site where the homepage and category pages have "noindex,follow" but the articles have "index,follow".

Recently we have noticed that the article pages are no longer showing in the Google SERPs (but they are in Bing!) - this was done by using the "site:" search operator.

Have double-checked our robots.txt file too just in case something silly had slipped in, but that's as it should be...

Has anyone else noticed similar behaviour or could suggest things I could check?

Thanks!

I completely agree with Brendan - Excellent Analytics really is excellent

It's useful in allowing you easily save your queries in text format so if you want to get similar data, you don't have to go through the rigmarole of recreating it via the interface, just copy and paste!  I have not tried to dynamically build the queries yet, but I'm sure you could build the query string based on variables set elsewhere in a spreadsheet...

I also like the fact that you can grab all your data in one go (unlike the web interface which forces you do click endlessly...).

Thought I'd post a follow up on our 6 months later to see if anyone else has seen a similar pattern in Bing rankings.

• Peaked at the end of June
• (compared to previous average rank) Declined by ~15% to end of July
• Same until end of Aug
• Declined by ~20% until end of Sept
• Improvement of ~15% until the end of Oct
• Decline by ~45% in mid-Nov (pretty much back to same levels) as beginning of June levels - mention on WebmasterWorld about this:
  • http://www.webmasterworld.com/msn_microsoft_search/4389293.htm
• Same until now

There have been changes to the content on the site, so not too surprised at some of the results, but would be good to know if the regularity of changes to the Bing algo has been seen by others...

Thanks for this - definitely some food for thought regarding how we handle 404s in general...

I am more worried about search engines than humans from this type of thing (we have had no referrals from this dodgy site) so would be interested to see if you still think a 301 is the best way to go since the link text may not be appropriate to our site (and perhaps this would be worse?!).