Backwards Links

[kthomas]

All of the internal pages of my websites have a page rank of 4 or better, and they all have a link to my home page, but for some reason they aren't showing up in my backwards links. Why?

[ihelpyou]

Welcome to the forums kthomas! :hi:

No idea. Links come and go and for no reason. Check back in one week and they might be there again.

[Advisor]

They may not actually be IN Google's database, and the PR4 is just a guesstimate 4 based on the main page.

Do an allinurl:yourdomain.com and see if all your pages show up.

Jill

[Cathy S]

I've had my internal links drop off of my backwards links list for the past 2 months with a corresponding drop in certain search strings. Before then the internal links showed up on my list.

Any ideas why Google isn't listing my internal links and if there is anything I need to do to remedy the situation? I thought I'd just wait at first, but it's now been about 2 months that I've had the shortened list. Many of my internal pages also rank 5, but more importantly than that Google used to list them and then they all suddenly dropped off.

[scottiecl]

Welcome to the forum Cathy S :hi:

Are you doing anything on your site that may be questionable in the eyes of the search engines? If so, you can probably clean up the issue and see the pages come back.

If you want to post a link, someone here will take a look and see if there is a problem. It could be a temporary drop for no reason, it could be a robots.txt problem, or it could be that Google has detected something it didn't like and dropped the pages.

[scottiecl]

Whoops! Welcome to you too, kthomas! :hi:

[Cathy S]

Well the website is www.endpcnoise.com - I don't think I'm doing anything questionable at all. The only thing I thought of as a possibility is that our old site www.nwccomputers.com (which some people still have the address of) has an automatic forward to our new site. Could this cause an elmination of our internal backwards links? This has been the case for the last 9 months and only in the last two months have those internal links dropped off. I thought it was just temporary at first...but...it's been a while.:confused:

[Advisor]

Cathy, how is the old site being forwarded? There are good ways and there are ways that the engines seem to think are tricks. If you can do the forward at the server level, that usually helps. (As opposed to a Meta redirect.)

Jill

[ihelpyou]

Welcome to the forums Cathy! :hi:

That could be your problem. You are using a meta refresh on the old domain and forwarding to the new. You need to take the old site offline and simply point the domain to the new one. Of course, that may just be one problem. You could have other issues with the pages not showing up.

[Alan Perkins]

Originally posted by kthomas
All of the internal pages of my websites have a page rank of 4 or better, and they all have a link to my home page, but for some reason they aren't showing up in my backwards links. Why?Because they don't link to your home page. :)

There are currently 52 pages from www.endpcnoise.com indexed by Google (http://www.google.com/search?q=allinurl%3A+www.endpcnoise.com+site%3Awww.endpcnoise.com&num=100&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&filter=0).

All apart from the home page contain cgi-bin in their URL.

Take for example http://www.endpcnoise.com/cgi-bin/e/specs_control_cnps6000-cu.html, which is indexed by Google. This contains a button labelled "HOME". But this button links to http://www.endpcnoise.com/cgi-bin/e/index.html

It looks like no page on your site links to your "home" page of www.endpcnoise.com

[scottiecl]

Thanks Alan!

I looked at the site and wondered if the cgi-bin in the URL was causing a problem.

But you're not saying the cgi-bin is the problem, but simply that none of the pages links directly to the home page, right?

Just checking because Google doesn't seem to want to look at any of the pages on my sites that have cgi-bin in the URL...

[Alan Perkins]

Originally posted by scottiecl
But you're not saying the cgi-bin is the problem, but simply that none of the pages links directly to the home page, right?Right.Just checking because Google doesn't seem to want to look at any of the pages on my sites that have cgi-bin in the URL... Which site?

[scottiecl]

http://www.columbia4kids.com

The section I'd really like indexed is http://www.columbia4kids.com/events/index.php

and my forum
http://www.columbia4kids.com/cgi-bin/datacgi/database.cgi?file=Forum&report=TopicIndex

The home page of the Events section is dynamic but "included" in a static url. The links to the sections are dynamic and aren't getting picked up.

It looks like the home page of the forum is indexed but the links to the threads aren't being followed.

The software provider has a "search engine front" that creates some SSI pages on demand to make the content more accessible but that is a maintenance hassle and possible duplicate content issue I really don't want to dredge up.

Thanks for any advice Alan!

[Daminc]

Perhaps this (http://www.searchengineethics.com/dynamicpages.htm) will help

[Alan Perkins]

I'm helping Scottie outside this thread. :)

I wrote an article for Jill on Optimizing Dynamic Content (http://www.highrankings.com/issue022.htm#guest).

[Daminc]

Nice article :up: Alan

[Cathy S]

Hello-

Thanks to everyone who responsed to my question about why our backwards links were down.

To restate my problem, all of our internal links on our google backwards links page have been down for a few months. Also, not all external links are counted on the backwards links page (even some with high page ranks aren't counted). I've searched the web myself and have found that our links have actually grown substantially. A few months ago we had 82 backwards links (including internal links), then for about two months we only had 42 (no internal links) and I just checked today and it is down to 38.

Our site is www.endpcnoise.com. Through this thread there were two clear suggestions for fixing this problem.

One - was to change the redirect from our old site (people still have the address of this website from business cards and old yellow page ads so this was desirable if it was ok with the search engines). I had our programmer change this redirect to our new site to be at the server level as was suggested.

Two - the HOME button which was on each page went to http://www.endpcnoise.com/cgi-bin/e/index.html instead of http://www.endpcnoise.com. I fixed these links.

After thinking about my problem, I also remembered that our programmer had set up a seperate webpage for search engines other than google that couldn't search dynamically created pages - this page gave links at the bottom of it to all of our products (our dynamically created pages). I thought that this might have caused a problem too, because google might have thought it was a doorway page, so I deleted the page (after all google is my main concern, not small search engines that can't handle dynamically created pages).

Anyhow, I made these changes and now google is only giving us less backwards links. :( Why? Could google have manually removed us from the index for one of the above items? Could we be removed from the index and still have our old pages listed? (We are still getting decent search engine results, our new products just aren't getting listed and our results are just down a bit.) Is there any other problem anyone can see with our site?

Thanks for your help. :)


Cathy