

Ask HN: Please help me with seo. 600k player statistics are not getting indexed. - mcorrientes

Hi everyone,
I'm having problems with my site getting indexed. I thought a hackernews member might could help me.<p>My site's holding about 600k player statistics and almost none of them are getting indexed. I'm not exactly sure what the reason is. About a week ago google crawled and indexed 300k pages in about 2-3 days but a few days later they dropped everything again.<p>We have more content than our competitor and the players statistic page is also liked and shared by visitors a lot.<p>Our competitor is doing quite well, he got about 4.6m of his player statistics indexed.<p>Cleaning up the HTML a bit, using meta title and descriptions, properly redirecting old site structures to the right place (301) didn't help, google still doesn't bother about indexing the player statistics.<p>Although they're still crawling some of them but they choose not show them.<p>I thought it might be because of duplicate content so I moved the languages from the structure (e.g. /kr/ ) to a sub domain (e.g. kr.riot5.com).<p>I'm not quite sure if my site's under a penalty or if there's something wrong with my content.<p>I feel a bit overwhelmed of all the possible reasons that might cause google to stop indexing my page and why they once indexed a lot.<p>I would be really grateful if someone could help me finding the problem.<p>The site's at http://www.riot5.com/
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Metatron
You could try a re-inclusion request. State your mysterious problem and just
frankly ask why and if there are any penalties or what you need to do to start
ranking. However Google do take forever to do anything. And even if you are
doing the right things already you may only see results in a matter of several
weeks.

Re-inclusion requests here (pretty much your only way to ask Google anything
easily, but responses aren't guaranteed)
[https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?pli=...](https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reconsideration?pli=1)

Or try the Webmaster forums, where Google folk apparently post every once in a
while, but it's mainly a clusterfuck of people hijacking your problem with
their own questions, and solutions being unreliably crowdsourced.

Remember: Google moves in mysterious ways. We cannot understand their arcane
techniques for we are not worthy.

~~~
mcorrientes
Thanks for the advice, I'll try it over the re-inclusion request.

~~~
reefoctopus
Do you have a google webmaster tools account? If you were being penalized for
some reason (which i doubt), webmaster tools will inform you.

~~~
mcorrientes
Thanks for mentioning it. I wasn't quite sure, but we're probably not
penalized, so I haven't done a reconsideration request. Apparently it's now
indexing slowly again.

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itsprofitbaron
First of all, you should only submit a reconsideration request if your site is
banned from Google (and you haven't used other methods to get it back in).

Your site is _not_ banned in Google - you can check this by searching for
"site:riot5.com"

In terms 301'ing your dead links this is a good thing to do however, don't
expect them to show in the same place in the SERPs as they were previously at
least not immediately.

I didn't find a canonical tag on your pages, not did I find a robots.txt page
or sitemap on your site you definitely should add those (you should also
submit the Robots.txt and Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools)

Similarly, as you have created sub-domains for languages you should really be
using Google Webmaster Tools and telling Google they're geo-ips. Ideally, you
should also .htaccess the pages so when you visit from another country you are
redirected to the geoip address.

There are other things you do as well but once you have done those, and along
with naturally building links to your site you should notice that your SERPs
are returning to where they once were and are improving.

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AznHisoka
Think about it from Google's perspective. They're indexing billions of pages..
millions of new days every single day. There's a lot of noise, and spam to
filter through. LOTS.

Why should they index everything on your site if it's not valuable content? It
seems like it's just profile data.. but what exactly should it rank for
anyway? Google considers this "thin content", and since the Panda update,
they've punished sites that have too much of this content (of course, every
site has some thin content, but for you, it's the majority)

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reefoctopus
It looks like you are using links which use onclick events instead of a
standard href. The 30+ javascript files included in the <head> section suggest
you might be using it in other places that you shouldn't be if your goal is
SEO.

That, the bad text/html ratio, and the non-descriptive urls are what i see as
the likely culprits. It looks like you have a good number of backlinks, and
that that number is growing quickly.

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WillyF
How are you linking to these stat pages? If you want Google to index
something, you have to show them that it's important by linking to it on your
site. Moreover, you don't seem to have a lot of Domain Authority, so internal
links may not be able to get all of those pages indexed.

Good external links are the best way to get something indexed. Good internal
links are probably the second best way.

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davidm
Your site seems to have quite a bit of duplicate content. In fact, every
search I did showed other sites when I searched for long strings of text
copied from your site.

Search Google for "Whenever Jarvan III, the king of Demacia, delivers one of
his rallying speeches"

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kerryfalk
Submit a sitemap to Google and update it every time you add pages. This helped
me get all of my pages indexed.

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ch00ey
Is there an email that I can reach you at? I wasn't able to find one in your
profile.

~~~
mcorrientes
My email is mcorrientes@googlemail.com

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shyn3
You probably grew too fast.

Slow down your growth next time, limit how many profiles they can view per
week. 300k at once they probably thought you were a spammer.

