We have had a surprising number of cases recently where the view that Google had of a website didn’t match the site owner’s view.  We will give you some examples and then a easy test that you can try on your own site. 

These situations can be split into several classes:

• Google could only see a single page.  Google could see the home page but the rest of the site was thought to belong to another domain.  This can happen when a redirect or forwarding of a site is set up incorrectly. 
• Google can see a lot of the site but not all of it.  Sometimes sections of a site can be invisible to the search engines if they cannot be reached through normal HTML links.  This can be a problem if you use Javascript drop down menus. 
• The search engines find content on the site that the owner didn’t know existed.    In one case a business had split in two and switched to using two domain names on the same server.  However the content became muddled and visitors to one site were seeing pages from both sites.  This confused the visitors and the site statistics.  Visitors to one of the sites were being logged to the other. 
• Sites get misused without the knowledge of the owner.  A small business found that the forum it ran for its customers had been loaded with spam messages and the site was now associated with adult sites. 

It is a good idea to check what pages Google has indexed for your site to see if there are more or less than you expect. 

This check is easy.  Go to Google and click on Advanced Search. 

Then enter your domain name (without the www) in the ‘Search within a site or domain:’ box and leave all other boxes empty.  Click on ‘Advanced Search’ and Google will display a list of all the pages from your site that are in its index. 

Don’t worry if the total is not exactly right - pages that Google considered unimportant may not be included and if you have dynamically generated pages they may appear twice with different search terms. 

However if when you look through the list there are pages you expect to find but can’t or there are pages you don’t recognise then further investigation may be warranted.  Contact us if you would like further assistance. 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.