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On one part of our site we have a section with a bunch of url's formatted like so:

http://mysite.com/section-name/?feed_id=1334

They are a list of a dozen individual links that are presented like:

<a href="http://mysite.com/section-name/?feed_id=1334">Article Title of Some Sort</a>
<a href="http://mysite.com/section-name/?feed_id=1333">Different Title</a>

I can see Google's bot hitting http://mysite.com/section-name/ but it never indexes the various articles (it's been 6 months). Why would this be?

Each link leads to a page that displays a complete, unique, article and they are not spammy in any way. They are updated and added to daily.

Could it be the use of the words feed_id in the url? Any suggestions on how to get Google to start indexing these articles?

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Two things stand out about your URLs. 1) There is no 'filename' - i.e. the query string follows directly after a 'directory'. I suspect (although I have no evidence to support my position) that if your URLs ended in /file.php?feed_id=1334 Google may index them. 2) The use of a simple query string could be avoided. If you rewrite your URLs, to something such as http://mysite.com/section-name/1334 they are typically perceived as being much more search engine friendly. – cyberx86 Jan 8 at 9:14
@cyberx86 Well, regarding the first point, urls on our site like http://foo.com/some-article-from-today/ get indexed correctly and don't have a 'filename'. I think your second point might be right, though. I also wonder if the word "feed" being in there makes Google think it's dealing with an rss feed and not index it the same way? Regardless I am going to try changing the urls to something like your second suggestion. Thx. – Lothar_Grimpsenbacher Jan 9 at 3:12
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I don't think it is the absence of the file name alone - it is the absence of the file name combined with the query string. Typically a query string is attached to a file name. Also you can use Google's webmaster tools to submit individual URLs to their index. – cyberx86 Jan 9 at 3:37
@cyberx - I did try to add these url patterns in Webmaster tools but explicitly adding them did not help (I gave it a month to work). There would be too many that change too often to submit them manually. Tomorrow I will propose we try something closer to your suggestion or we may try using text from the atricle to create the url... something like http://foo.com/section-name/Latest-figures-for-SASS-uptake or perhaps even http://foo.com/section-name/saas=1234 – Lothar_Grimpsenbacher Jan 9 at 5:12
I believe the equal sign is a reserved character - avoid using it as part of the URL (other than the query string). Look into the necessary rewrite rules for 'pretty/SEO friendly' URLs. Typically, you map the location of a parameter in the URL to a named parameter in your query string (with regexes and capture groups in your rewrite statement). – cyberx86 Jan 9 at 5:23
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