google page help

Hi all. Just a quickie. I have noticed some of my pages do not appear on Google search results. Two examples are:

http://www.pawsforwildlife.co.uk/index.php?q=acanthosphinx_guessfeldtii.html

http://www.pawsforwildlife.co.uk/index.php?q=five-spotted_hawkmoth.html

Could this be due to a lack of content?? or is there something more obvious that I am missing

well, are these page "old" enough?

Maybe a sitemap could help Google, I see that these pages can’t be reached directly by menu...

Google doesn’t always index every single page of a site, even if you submit a sitemap. Go to www.google.com/webmasters and make a webmaster tools account and submit a sitemap. This will help you track how many of your pages are in the index -- however, I’ve never personally seen it go all the way to 100% indexation of the sitemap. Google has limited resources and has to prioritize what’s worth crawling.

You can increase the chance that a new page will be indexed by putting it closer to the homepage (in terms of click depth). For example, if you were to link to the ten most recently added pages from the homepage, they might get indexed quicker.

Generally, I wouldn’t worry about this. Pages that Google considers important will get indexed, and the other pages probably won’t rank well even if they are indexed. Submit a sitemap and keep it up to date, otherwise don’t lose sleep over it.

I guess I can make Friendly URL’s as mentioned. So to get it right I do the following...

Turn on friendly URL’s
Delete the prefix of index.php?q=
Rename the ht.access file to .htaccess

Is that everything? Sorry but I am new to this kinda thing

Thansk all. What sort of implications would switching to Friendly URLs have? Would it not confuse Google as they will have indexed the older pages with the ’index.php?q=’ prefix

What sort of implications would switching to Friendly URLs have? Would it not confuse Google as they will have indexed the older pages with the ’index.php?q=’ prefix

Yes, as I discussed in the other thread on this topic.

My advice is to either leave well enough alone, or switch your suffix to .php so that you can redirect all of your current URLs to the new ones using a 301 redirect without breaking the friendly URL code.

I really don’t think there’s a compelling reason to switch, unless you continue to have problems with indexing in Bing.

This is a cross-post from another thread, but it’s relevant here and may be of help to others who want to switch from unfriendly to friendly URLs without confusing Google.

OK, here’s how to switch to friendly URLs without confusing Google:

• Go to Tools->Configuration->Friendly URLs and set Use Friendly URLs and Use Friendly URL Aliases to yes and set the friendly URL suffix to .php
• Rename your ht.access file to .htaccess
• Add the following code to your .htaccess file above the friendly URL redirect (the one that says "# For Friendly URLs" above it)

I just tested this code, it works. This will 301 redirect all of your existing URLs to the new friendly URLs without breaking the friendly URL redirect, which should accomplish everything you need.

Let me know when you’ve done this and I’ll help you test it.