Google Indexed URLs Going Down?

Google PageRank / Amazon.com

• Hello SEO Expert: I have a two part question: QUESTION 1. Is it fair to say that if a page has a Google PageRank of 0, that this page has NOT been indexed by Google? ************* Part of my marketing strategy was to open a zShop at Amazon.com. http://www.amazon.com/shops/respree Among other things, it was my hope that this presence would boost my website PageRank (i.e. get a lot of inbound links from a high quality site). Reason: I have 50,000 products listed at Amazon.com, each with 5 links to my site (+250,000 inbound links). Given the 500,000+ affiliates Amazon.com, I imagine their PageRank is high (9 or 10), although their homepage says 3 (I imagine probably due to a redirect of some kind). My strategy does not appear to be working because: Amazon's zShop "product-pages" (on which my inbound links appear) do NOT appear to be indexed by Google (they have a PageRank of 0, [thus, see my question above]). One of two things is happening. a) Amazon does not want Google to index their zshop product pages (I can't imagine why) OR b) Google has or can't index these pages. I can't imagine why either. I don't see anything in the URL that would lead me to believe the spider would not index the page (like a ?) Here's an example of one of the URLs: http://s1.amazon.com/exec/varzea/ts/exchange-glance/Y02Y1746180Y8162821/qid=1030119863/sr=1-1/002-9065926-9208818 [Sorry for that long lead-in] QUESTION 2. Can anyone speculate (or find anything on the Net) why Amazon zShop product pages are not getting indexed by Google? (I can't imagine that is an Amazon decision. Given the tons they have invested in technology, I don't believe the spiders would not have an adverse affect on their servers, despite the millions of pages [products] they have). As a side note, in the 'retail' portion of Amazon (books, music, DVD's, etc.), those product pages ARE being indexed by Google.

• Answer:

  Hi, Let's look at your first question : QUESTION 1. Is it fair to say that if a page has a Google PageRank of 0, that this page has NOT been indexed by Google? The answer here is yes and no :-) How's that for clarity? As far as this page goes, the answer is yes, this page has probably never been indexed, nor is it likely to be in the near future. A page rank of 0 however doesn't mean that a page won't be indexed. It simply means that the google engine holds it as very irrelevant to its current needs, or that it is not likely to look at it very often. There are several websites with a ranking on the front page of 0 that will show up if you keyword it right or ask for it directly by name. No for : QUESTION 2. Can anyone speculate (or find anything on the Net) why Amazon zShop product pages are not getting indexed by Google? (I can't imagine that is an Amazon decision. Given the tons they have invested in technology, I don't believe the spiders would not have an adverse affect on their servers, despite the millions of pages [products] they have). Really the truth of the matter is that both Amazon and Google probably don't want those pages indexed. As you saw with the redirect, Amazon takes a great deal of trouble to redirect front page requests inside to the deeper areas of their website, negating page ranking to those pages inside and not doing any favors to the robots themselves.(thier top level areas have a ranking of 8 as far as I can tell, you can see this by tring to go to http://www.amazon.com/robots.txt this will bring you to a top level "Page not Found" page, and show you a higher ranking) On top of this most of the pages, such as yours can only be found by "searching for items" most of the time. Sometimes they appear on the front pages, but most are found through queries of a data base. Robots don't query, they follow links, and Amazon knows this, so instead of adapting a more robot friendly attitude, they've decided to go with the faster, more user friendly search database interface. On Googles side, they don't want the robot tied up inside a huge site like Amazon.com for very long, so they limit the pages they will search and even further the amount of dynamic pages they will search. On top of this, they want as many "good site hits" to any search on their website, and don't want every listing on the front page of a search to be for Amazon.com. So indexing all the products, books, DVD's and other things is not in their best interest as well. (Our ours as Search engine users for that matter) Your idea was a good one, as far as it went, but you are right, its not going to work for you very well. A better idea might be to find more robot friendly sites, that take submissions of reviews and write reviews for DVD's books, what ever it is you are selling and post a link from that site back to yours. This is a great way to get noticed, provide information and increase your page ranking all in the same stroke. Links : Google explains Page Ranking ://www.google.com/technology/index.html The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hyper-textual Web Search Engine http://www-db.stanford.edu/%7Ebackrub/google.html Thanks webadept-ga