Google has my home page URL wrong - again!

What Can I Do and What is Causing It?

[jimh009]

Hello,

Last month, Google messed up the location of my home page in the update. When you type in the name of my web site, the url that google displays is:

www.XXXX.com/phpbb2/..%5C..%5C..%5Cindex.htm

When right clicking over the link for the properties, you get the following link url:

[XXXX.com...]

I figured it was just a Dominic hiccup last month and lived with it. But now, for the second straight month, Google once again has my home page listed at this screwy url. What is causing this problem? And how can I go about getting it fixed? Should I email Google about it - in the event it is some strange bug in their update that they might want to look at?

Even stranger is that freshbot DOES pick up the right url. As such, once freshbot picks up the page, I have the unique experience of seeing two homepages listed in the SERPS - at least for a few days (with the wrong one on top, of course). I only have one home page, too, by the way!

Jim

[WebGuerrilla]

I think the problem has to do with how the image link that points to your home page in your forum is coded

it looks like this

<a href="..\..\..\index.htm">

Your slashes are pointing inthe wrong direction.

[jimh009]

That's the thing, though. My index page (home page) isn't even in my forum. It should just be www.XXX.com/index.htm. Additionally, the links from my forum to the home page are all correct.

Why Google even thinks the home page is in the forum is beyond me.

Is there anything I can do about this? I had no problems with this until last month. Should I consider reporting htis problem to Google at all, and if so, where?

Jim

[edited by: jimh009 at 6:53 am (utc) on June 17, 2003]

[WebGuerrilla]

Google is grabbing the link from your forum homepage. The link back to your homepage from the forum is coded wrong. When Google requests the bad link, your server serves up the page. If you hard code that link, the problem will be fixed.

[jimh009]

Hi WebGuerilla,

The link form the forum page back to the home page works fine, but, it was a relative link.

I re-did the link to make it a hard coded link.

Do you think this will solve the problem?

Jim

[jdMorgan]

jimh009,

Correcting that link will fix your problem, but it may take another update... Or maybe not, since your correct URL is also in their index, freshed June 15th. If this correct page sticks in the index, you can consider asking Google to manually remove the bad URL (after carefully analyzing the impact this may have on PR within your site).

The problem was not that the link was relative, but as WebGuerrilla posted above, that the slashes were backwards.

<td><a href="..\..\..\index.htm"><img src="templates/subSilver/images/body_of_water_logo.jpg" border="0" alt="Return to Home Page of jimh009's site" vspace="1" /></a></td>

Should have been:

<td><a href="[b]../../../[/b]index.htm"><img src="templates/subSilver/images/body_of_water_logo.jpg" border="0" alt="Return to Home Page of jimh009's site" vspace="1" /></a></td>

A link like this will work if you're developing and testing on a Windows box, and it may work on a Windows server, but it won't work consistently across the web, because "\" has no special meaning in a HTTP URL, whereas "/" does.

Also, looking at the way your URLs are set up, it may also be the case that the relative link should have been just "<a href="../index.htm">", but maybe you've got some server tricks working there.

HTH,
Jim

[g1smd]

I would run these pages through [validator.w3.org...] to discover what other typos might be hindering robots and and spiders, and see if any other problems might cause failure in non-IE browsers.

[spud01]

will getting the wrong DOC type harm your site from been crawl correctly or for that matter be crawled at all?

[g1smd]

It probably doesn't matter, unless you mix the HTML doctype with XHTML code, or vice versa. However, standards compliant browsers may have major problems with displaying your page if you declare the code as one thing, when in fact it is actually something else. I write most stuff as HTML 4.01 Transitional. Unless you have really good reasons to use something else, then I would also stick to that.

[jimh009]

Thanks everyone for the help. I changed the link to a fixed link, so hopefully by next update we'll be good to go. What is strange about this, though, is why I didn't have this problem for many months before this? One would think that if the link was wrong, Google would have listed it the first month the forum appeared in their index.

JD Morgan - Thanks for the detailed reply. My site is on a windows server, which may explain why the link always worked just fine (thus hiding the problem from me) - yet the coding problem behind the scenes tripped up Google.

Jim