Why Isn't Google Indexing Deep Pages?

Google has not been very freindly to our site [http://www.PopStarsPlus.com/] over the last few weeks. Because of all of the re-indexing and shuffling around of their rankings, we seemed to have been shuffled around - and not in a good way.

During 2005 our site has been increasing by 10% to 15% in unique users each month. But then skidded to a halt in January. Even with the addition of several pages the number of uniques has remained the same. The same is true for February. What is going on here?

The indexing of the site has also gotten progressively worse. In December, the home page was indexed at least once every two days with about a four day lag between going deep into the website. In fact, today, March 2nd I have some pages that have not been indexed for one whole month (February 3rd) with any new page not showing up at all (luckily most were picked up by on Yahoo and MSN).

What I find strange is that on February 19th or 20th, all of the pages on the site were indexed (and given new page page ranks) but dissapeared within a half a day -- and still have not returned.

Being fans of many celebs, we originally started this site to provide information about celebrities for others on the web to enjoy. We did not really want to concern ourselves with SEO (search engine optimization), we have other sites that are specifically for e-commerce and we have tried to do every kind of SEO imaginable. But for this site we tried to take a modified Field of Dreams approach - not just "If you build it, they will come," but "If you build a site with good information and resources, they will come." Until the beginning of the year, that has been the case -- but it seems that the power of Google has taken hold.

Over the past few months we have had requests from other celebrity sites to swap links -- in most cases we have said no. Remember, we do not merely put the link on our page, but we have to go to each of the celebrity pages and review them so that we can give them our own rating. This takes a lot of time -- especially if the other site has 400-500+ celebrities that match ours. We have decided that it would be of a much better use of our time to add more content on our site. [Content is "King" and all that jazz] But it looks like reciprocal links with other "quality" and "relevant" sites would give us better ranking, which would give us a large numer of visitors. Does it pay to add content to a site that no one would read? So over the next few months our readers will begin to see less content being added and more reciprocal links.

We have also found this true on one of our new sites - www.BiographyPlus.com, which is based on PopStarsPlus, but will include many more celebs and non-so celebrity individuals such as historical, social and political figures. We have also decided to hold off on a rated links section for that site so we can add more people a lot quicker.

I do not know if you have learned anything from my scriblings today, but if you have a website of your own, you may be going through some of the same troubles as we are.

I.R.