Rookie Question: Why don't certain pages index?

Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi

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Rookie Question: Why don't certain pages index?

seanyg

3:42 pm on Dec 31, 2010 (gmt 0)

Hey guys,

Been studying SEO for a while now but I have a rookie question. Please help with a quick answer if you can!

My Wordpress blog has a total of 205 pages, yet Google webmaster tools says that only 160 of these pages have been indexed.

10 or so of the pages that aren't indexed are "no follow" / "no index" on the Robots.txt, but there are 35 pages that aren't indexed... these pages are on my sitemap.

Why aren't they indexed? What can I do to get them indexed?

Thanks in advance,

~Sean

goodroi

9:09 pm on Dec 31, 2010 (gmt 0)

hi seanyg,

google is not trying to index every page that exists. they are trying to index every page they think has significant value. you need to signal to google that your pages have value. the two most important ways to do this are:
#1 - get links from external sites and internal pages pointing to each of your urls
#2 - make sure each page has significant and unique content

not every page on a site is important and almost every website has some pages that google will never index. some examples of pages that google will not want to index:
-privacy policy that was 100% copied from another site
-contact form with no content
-thank you page for your contact form
-404 error page
-page with 100% of the content in an iframe

dont worry about having google index 100% of your site. focus on google indexing and ranking your valuable pages.

seanyg

1:15 am on Jan 2, 2011 (gmt 0)

Thanks for the reply GoodROI!