SEO pppl. Post pages indexed, but main index page not?
 

Ok, I put up a new blog a few days back and have been watching for it to get indexed so I can start working it a little for position. It's been taking longer than usual for a blog to get indexed, which doesn't really bother me. Anyways, today I showed up in google, but only two post pages from the blog are indexed, and not the main index.php itself. Whats that all about? I started firing backlinks at it a few days ago, and is it a relatively new domain. I was worried for a bit I maybe overdid it and got sandboxed. If this is the case would the whole site not go down? Is it normal for backpages to sometime be indexed before the main page itself? I'm not sure what's happening here at the moment.

bumping for ideas

I am still waiting for 1 of my new blogs to show up too, not even a post page for me, been live for 7 days now with 16 hand written updates and about 10 backlinks pointing to it, frustrating :)

I mean usually I get indexed in 48-72 hours, and I throw up quite a few blogs. This is almost a week with a dozen handwritten posts, and a dozen hosted galleries with handwritten descriptions. I have 3 pages indexed, but none of the ones I really want or need in the index. It's strange to me, I just assume that they'd index my main page instead of 3 of my deeplinked gallery pages. Either way, I just created and submitted a site map to see if that helps any, and to track what's going on. i want to get that mainpage indexed so i can start my crawl to page one :winkwink::winkwink::winkwink:

don't worry. same thing just happened to me with a new blog. index showed up soon enough.

patience young jedi

Right now there is a google dance, so you are going to see some unusual behaviour. Also where are you getting your backlinks from, cos backlinks from blogs and directories carry less value (at least in my case) than it used to be. Work up the twitter pages , google love them :)))

Twitter?

"sandboxing" (for a catch-all term to use anyways) could easily have a situation where only a small percentage of a site may be indexed..... I have had a site get 2000 pages indexed, only to watch it get sandboxed to where a week later 1600 were indexed, then 1400, then 1100, then 800, then 550, then 300, then 200, then 110.... where it leveled out and sat for almost a year, then recently it crept up a bit again to 150, then 200, and now sitting around 300 steady (the site has a few thousand pages on it)...


not sure if that applies to a site with only 4 or 5 pages to index

my sitemap comes up with 27 pages, of which 3 are in the index. the entire site is in google's cache, and google tools states that the the entire site was crawled on the 9th. i'm a little worried i threw a bit too much linkjuice at it too fast, but i guess i'll just have to wait and see...

Actually just noticed that this exact thing has happened to the blog I mentioned above, checked today and yep 1 post page and 1 category page indexed but not the main/index page.

check if your post pages are tagged, labelled (you're using those, right?) or titled with single, highly requested keywords... the user agents might be diving for those before indexing your whole index page (blog indexes tend to be looong).

Plus how many posts/days/whatever do you have listed on your indeX?

What does this have to do with it? I asked a question in another thread about how many posts was best to have on the index but really didn't get any good answers

That's a tough question to answer, it really depends on how many words are in each post. And you have to go beyond just building it for the engine and make it look good to the eye, so generally I use as many as it takes to level out the sidebar. I think that will be the most common answer to that question.

Now the question about if that is enough, well that depends on how big your sidebar is, which would dictate how much text showed on the content side.

Another thing i would say is never go bigger then 100k, if the page size says more then that get rid of it. A quick check of my wp sites that are thought well of to google shows index's with 25-40k page size. So that much?..:)

Well, at the moment on one of my new blogs I have 13 posts on main index, the side bar is like 2 posts long at the moment though. You can check it here if you feel like giving constructive crtiscism :)