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URL Structure/Index Issues - Help Please!

by PotentDigital
2 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hi all,

I've been talking with someone about a site that's experiencing some issues with getting content indexed quickly. There's definitely some duplicate content problems, but I'm wondering whether the URL structure they're using will also be making things harder.

I'd love to hear your comments/thoughts on this.

They're regularly publishing new content on pages with URLs like this:

www.site.com/latest/article-title-1
www.site.com/latest/article-title-2
www.site.com/latest/article-title-3

However, the page www.site.com/latest doesn't exist on the site (and return a Page Not Found error).

All of the articles are actually linked to from a page at www.site.com/news.

There are links to every new piece of content from the home page and Google seems to be finding the titles from there. However, the actual pages themselves aren't being indexed for a long time (sometimes a week or more), or not at all.

Any thoughts on the impact the URL structure could be having (or not) here?

Thanks

Chris
#indexing #issues #structure or index #url #url structure
  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Originally Posted by PotentDigital View Post

    They're regularly publishing new content on pages with URLs like this:

    www.site.com/latest/article-title-1
    www.site.com/latest/article-title-2
    www.site.com/latest/article-title-3

    However, the page www.site.com/latest doesn't exist on the site (and return a Page Not Found error).
    That happens sometimes on old HTML sites where the missing page is actually a directory/folder that contains a group/category of pages.

    Think of it like a folder on your PC desktop that includes a 2nd folder (ex: .../latest/...) and inside the 2nd folder are all your internal pages, example:

    • .../latest/article-title-1
    • .../latest/article-title-2
    • .../latest/article-title-3

    The pages (ex: .../latest/article-title-1) can still be easily indexed as long as you have links on existing pages that Google already knows about & can easily find when they reindex the old page with a list of updated links pointing to the new pages.

    If you don't have links pointing to the new pages they're orphaned pages.
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  • Profile picture of the author PotentDigital
    Thanks for getting back to me.

    This is a fairly new site and there are definitely links to all of the new articles (social as well as links from the homepage/sidebar). I think I'd understand the situation if those articles were just being published somewhere with no links (thanks for your really clear explanation on that).

    What seems odd is that if I search for the title of one of the articles, Google will show several pages from the site which have links to the article (homepage plus another couple), so clearly Google has seen the link. But, the actual article pages aren't always being indexed quickly (or at all).

    Does that sound like the issue is something other than the URL structure?

    I'm wondering if the articles are being penalized for duplicate content (I've not looked fully at that yet) which is why the titles are showing in Google from other pages which link to them, but the articles themselves are being removed from the index... Is there anything else that could be going on here?

    Really appreciate anyone's thoughts on this.
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