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Indexing Problems with Dreamweaver Code in header?

         

BallochBD

12:35 pm on Mar 13, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



My site is not being spidered and my pages no longer have descriptions, cache or title. I have another couple of sites and I now note that these are beginning suffer the same problem (as discussed in [webmasterworld.com...]

Since the sites were all created in a similar way I am now investigating the possibility that the Googlebot is being blocked (or perhaps discouraged!) by the presence of the Dreamweaver inserted text betwen the <html> and <head> tags. This is as follows ...

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html><!-- InstanceBegin template="/Templates/widgets.dwt" codeOutsideHTMLIsLocked="false" -->
<head>

Can anyone offer any advice or assistance with this?

XtendScott

11:48 pm on Mar 13, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I have not had a problem with it. It is just a <!-- Comment Tag -->

Google ignores them. Must be something other than DW.

encyclo

12:19 am on Mar 14, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



The problem definitely does not lie with the Dreamweaver comment. There are millions of sites out there with such DW comments, all of which are indexed fine.

You say that your site isn't being spidered - do you mean that Googlebot is not accessing the pages in question at all? If so, it's not going to be an on-page factor.

Have you validated your robots.txt [searchengineworld.com]? If your pages are being spidered, have you validated the html? Is there anything else on the page which would invite a penalty - some (how shall I put it...) over-zealous SEO, for example?

skipfactor

12:44 am on Mar 14, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I have several sites using DW templates w/o issue; in fact, a new shopping cart via DW template added a few weeks ago was crawled yesterday for the first time.

>>Can anyone offer any advice or assistance with this?

Sit tight. Gbot's been slow lately on some stuff.

shrirch

1:17 am on Mar 14, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



>> ="/Templates/widgets.dwt"

Could this be a factor? I suspect Google dampens on certain on page factors and perhaps the real term for "widgets" on your page might be a factor?

(I'm assuming you're convinced that the snippet you posted above is the one and only case for your problems.)

Jenstar

1:21 am on Mar 14, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I've have used keywords as my Dreamweaver template name (for ease of use, not for SE reasons) and have never had a problem with this either. I agree, the issue is something other than the Dreamweaver specific code.

BallochBD

11:03 am on Mar 14, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



<Have you validated your robots.txt? If your pages are being spidered, have you validated the html? Is there anything else on the page which would invite a penalty - some (how shall I put it...) over-zealous SEO, for example?>

I have tried all the usual validations, etc. but everything seems to be fine. The main site in question was spidered for over two years before this happened. And there is nothing in there that is spammy. Anyway, thanks for the comments. It looks like this comment thingy is not my problem so I'll have to look elsewhere I suppose.

powerofeyes

11:30 am on Mar 14, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



We design many sites in dreamweaver, all of them uses dreamweaver templates i never had problems getting those sites spidered,

Those tags are only used by dreamweaver, They become comment tags when it comes to browsers,

So yes you should look somewhere else to see potential problems,

Recently Googlebot is a bit slow in picking up new pages, If your pages are pretty new then you have to wait for moretime to get the pages into google index,

BallochBD

11:49 am on Mar 14, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



There are more than eighty pages and I have close on 200 inbound links although Google does not recognise these. As I said, the site is more than two years old and it still has PR5. The bot stopped visiting at the end of January.