deborahbaker - 11:17 am on Nov 5, 2012 (gmt 0)

Hi Thanks for the replies

Out of curiosity have you noticed if your home page has been replaced with an inner page and that page appears maybe somewhere around page 7 (no not because I love that number!) in the SERPs?

Not that I can see

What did you do for this exactly? Sometimes technical mistakes block or direct search engines to a wrong direction. If it was as simple as you've described - from subfolder to the root of your domain - you should be able to achieve it with a single line in your .htaccess.

I have a lot of redirects in my .htaccess file because i had three landing pages and I have another url pointing to this domain so its a bit complicated. I think the .htaccess file is okay because I got the host company to do it for me, but I am not 100% sure.

Also, have you checked what G says for your robots.txt in WMT?

I had a look and asked WMT to fetch the file - it said "Crawl postponed because robots.txt was inaccessible". I dont understand this as it is a basic robots.txt file and is just sitting there in my root directory waiting to be spidered! So I ran the "test" function and this is the result.

Test results

Url

Googlebot

Googlebot-Mobile

<Mod's note. Removed live link to actual site. Likely to removed subsequent discussion referring to actual site itself.>

Allowed by line 2: Disallow:

Detected as a directory; specific files may have different restrictions


Allowed by line 2: Disallow:

Detected as a directory; specific files may have different restrictions

So is it okay or not do you think? because WMt has now totally confused me.

I had a client a few months ago who was in a similar situation as yours, it turned out he enabled rel canonical on some pages, but it in fact was canonicaling all pages to one page on the site, causing a massive site de-index. Such a simple thing was overlooked for many months.

This is something I have to do too - canonicalise. Any advice or tutorial on this would be appreciated.

One other thing when I checked WMT it said "no sitemaps" so I entered the url and asked it to test the sitemap and it said it was okay. When I go back in again it says "no sitemaps" I checked my sitemap and got an error "Missing "charset" attribute for "text/xml" document" I did a bit of research and was even more confused as to whether to use an internal DTD or external DTD or whatever.

My question is can anyone give me the exact statement I need to insert into my sitemap please? Also is this what is stopping Google seeing the sitemap?. I used an online site to produce the sitemap.
.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 5:16 pm (utc) on Nov 5, 2012]
[edit reason] removed domain name, fixed paragraph formatting [/edit]