What do "omitted results" say about a site?

Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi

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What do "omitted results" say about a site?

wariental

9:25 pm on Apr 30, 2007 (gmt 0)

We have a fairly established website. Primarily the index page. The rest of our sub pages(3000 pages) have php? in the url and it seems that google is throwing those into "ommited results". We want to go and update our whole linking structure into more seo friendly urls with unique title tags. The only concern being can this effect our index page listings? Do ommited results contribute to the way you rank or are these results considered garbage? Any comments or suggestions and answers are greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

tedster

11:07 pm on Apr 30, 2007 (gmt 0)

Unless you are using many parameters in that query string, the url itself is not likely to be the reason for those pages being in "omitted results". More likely is that the algo sees these pages as being too similar (near duplicate) to the pages that are not omitted.

If the pages are low PR, sometimes Google maske a quick decision based on title and meta description - so ensure that each page has a unique title and description that is quite specific to the page content.

Not to say that rewriting the url can't be a "somewhat" helpful step for ranking. But make sure the essential on-page factors are handled first, or you're not likely to see much reward for your troubles. in fact, you might accidentally cause more troubles if there are technical errors that allow duplicate urls to resolve to the same content.

One last thing - are you talking about omitted results in the in site: operator search, or in a regular search?

wariental

11:45 pm on May 1, 2007 (gmt 0)

to clarify, our title tags are all the same right now for all pages and this is by far without a doubt the main reason they are thrown into ommited results, since we mostly sell products with not much more than a 3 lines of texts seperating the differences between the pages. However, with this we also have the ability now to make the URLS user friendly. Do you think its not worth changing the urls and maybe just change the title tags to 3000 unique title tags that will reflect the product models/names?

tedster

2:19 am on May 2, 2007 (gmt 0)

Yes, I would do everything you can to make the pages unique first -- title, description, on-page content. As I said above, the url itself is not the most likely source of your problem.

If you currently get almost no traffic anyway, then you've got little to lose by putting in a url rewriting scheme right now as well. Just make sure that you "nail it" technically and don't allow more than one url to resolve with a 200 http status for the same content.