Hi all. I’m quite new to NP, and completely new to this forum, so I apologize if this seems like a dumb question or one that’s been covered before (though I’ve scanned and haven’t seen anything similar).
For almost 5 years now I’ve “operated” a real estate oriented website where people advertise properties for sale. I’d rather not identify it, but it’s like a much, much smaller version of ForSaleByOwner.com. I put the word “operated” in quotation marks because my knowledge base is pretty low. I had the great domain name, and the concept for how the site would look and work, but I have no technical programming skills or knowledge base whatsoever. The site was programmed by my son while he was a college student. Anytime there’s some type of glitch, which fortunately doesn’t happen too often, I still have to rely on him (but website design isn’t his area of expertise either).
Over the years, there’s been several times when I’ve run the Google “site command” to see how many of my site’s pages were indexed, and generally it’s been fairly stable at just under 2,000 pages. Most of the pages, like for individual states and ads, are dynamically generated. I checked a couple of weeks ago, and it was at about that same level. For some reason I checked a few days later, and it said there were only 21 pages indexed. A few days after that it was down to 19 – that’s one heck of a drop!
With my son’s assistance, we did get Google Analytics installed, but it doesn’t reveal any problems. He’s also in the process of getting a sitemap submitted (but we haven’t had one up until now and it doesn’t seem to have hurt us much). Anyone have any ideas as to what might have caused this huge drop in the number of pages indexed?
And here’s another thing that seems puzzling. I often run searches to see how we’re doing in the search engines, for example, something like “property for sale in New York” – and then I do the same search but for other states. For many states, we often come out in the top 5 or so. When I do these searches now, there are fewer states that we show up for, but we still do show up in the top 5 for quite a few, even for states where that “state page” isn’t among the 19 total that Google now says it has indexed. Is it normal for a page to show up in the search results if it doesn’t show up as being indexed at all?
Sorry for the way-too-long post, but anyone have any ideas or suggestions? Thanks much.
For almost 5 years now I’ve “operated” a real estate oriented website where people advertise properties for sale. I’d rather not identify it, but it’s like a much, much smaller version of ForSaleByOwner.com. I put the word “operated” in quotation marks because my knowledge base is pretty low. I had the great domain name, and the concept for how the site would look and work, but I have no technical programming skills or knowledge base whatsoever. The site was programmed by my son while he was a college student. Anytime there’s some type of glitch, which fortunately doesn’t happen too often, I still have to rely on him (but website design isn’t his area of expertise either).
Over the years, there’s been several times when I’ve run the Google “site command” to see how many of my site’s pages were indexed, and generally it’s been fairly stable at just under 2,000 pages. Most of the pages, like for individual states and ads, are dynamically generated. I checked a couple of weeks ago, and it was at about that same level. For some reason I checked a few days later, and it said there were only 21 pages indexed. A few days after that it was down to 19 – that’s one heck of a drop!
With my son’s assistance, we did get Google Analytics installed, but it doesn’t reveal any problems. He’s also in the process of getting a sitemap submitted (but we haven’t had one up until now and it doesn’t seem to have hurt us much). Anyone have any ideas as to what might have caused this huge drop in the number of pages indexed?
And here’s another thing that seems puzzling. I often run searches to see how we’re doing in the search engines, for example, something like “property for sale in New York” – and then I do the same search but for other states. For many states, we often come out in the top 5 or so. When I do these searches now, there are fewer states that we show up for, but we still do show up in the top 5 for quite a few, even for states where that “state page” isn’t among the 19 total that Google now says it has indexed. Is it normal for a page to show up in the search results if it doesn’t show up as being indexed at all?
Sorry for the way-too-long post, but anyone have any ideas or suggestions? Thanks much.
