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.

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

Thank you webadept for your response.  Your answers were logical and
made perfect sense.

I actually set up shop at Amazon for the primary reason of selling
products and providing 250,000 opportunities for people to visit my
site.  The PageRanking 'theory' was a hopeful bi-product.

Thanks again.

This is an extensive explanation of Google PageRank(TM):
http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html

The reasons that Google might not be indexing Amazon.com contents may
be:
1) Amazon.com have too many pages.  Google limits the number of pages
per site it can index (I think 10000) unless the site has a contract
with Google to index all its contents.

2) Pages at Amazon.com are machine-created (i.e. the info are in a
database and the web pages are only created when the user requests for
it)