What if Google says 1,000 pages of my site are indexed but only shows 120?
 

If you do the 'site:www....' thing in Google and it says you have 1,000 pages indexed but you scroll to the end of the list and it only displays 100 or 200 of those pages what does it mean? Can the other pages get any google traffic in any way?


Thanks

duplicate/similar content?

yes they are very similar pages. I mean there is a paragraph description of content and a different pic but the code is probably 98% the same.

Do those have any chance of getting Google Traffic if they show up in the number of links but not in the results?

possibly a chance at getting traffic if someone searched for some obscure longtail that you happened to have in one of the pages, but as far as them ranking anywhere realistically that many surfers would come across in a given day, not very likely


but the same might go for probably a good percentage of your top 120 pages too

I get the feeling the 800 that don't show up in the list have no chance regardless of search term. Can someone confirm? Why would it say so many links and not display them?

don't go by feeling....


if you want to confirm it, do a simple test... go to one of those pages you aren't seeing listed and copy over a whole unique sentence and put it in " " quotes and do a search on that in google, see if the page shows up or not... simple

short answer no you will not get traffic from pages that don't show

however if you change out the layout of your page (ie with css and div tags) those pages will look different to the search engine and get released from the duplicate content hell they are currently in.

the numbers I gave are much higher. Its really showing 400 out of 4,000. I would have to pick a link, go through the 400 and make sure its not listed there. if it is listed there I have to do it over and over. thats a pain man.

make sure your google preferences are set to display 100 results per page... that gives you only 4 pages to search through, do a ctrl-f and put a short identifier to search through really quickly and narrow it down, might still be a pain but not as bad (if you are determined to experiment, but it is probably a waste of time anyways)

anyways, gideon is right and like I said, any traffic that you would possibly see would have to be searching for something ridiculously specific, so that in reality at best you would be hoping to get 1 hit in a blue moon, but more likely zero


are you running an rss fed site by chance? once google decides in their minds that a site is a splog then it is a bitch to get decent indexing from them :2 cents:

No RSS feeds. This is a quality site but many pages look very similar. The size of this site is enough for it to matter if these obscure pages are getting 3 hits a month or not.

why don't you go in your logs and see how many pages are getting 3 hits a month from google referrals?

change your template to reorder the content like i suggested
if the unique content is prioritized you will not be considered duplicate content even though the header nav and footer are all the same
the links will just naturally start showing up
then you can focus on optimizing the unique content to get you the ranking you really want

fix the templating stuff first
once you know that google is displaying most/everything that it indexs you can tweek the content to get listing for the keywords you actually want to get listed for