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I have a couple of sites which I've designed using Dreamweaver templates and I've found that Google has only indexed the header and footer (ie the template bits) but not the page content.
I've been searching for previous postings of this problem but every post I've found on the subject suggests that it should work OK.
Does anyone have any ideas of what I should look for?
Many thanks in anticipation or your help!
Bob.
I wonder if you may have technical problems. Have you validated those pages? And do you have a robots.txt file?
From what I've seen Google just doesn't seem to like the very top of the pages being identical all across the whole site lately.
What an odd thing for Google to decide to do. I imagine a large percentage of the Internet is like that. I do suspect that Google is being reluctant to do more than just peak at the first page or two of new sites, though.
Yes, it's strange. One site is older than the other and I'm fairly sure that it used to be indexed OK on Google, but it certainly isn't now.
I just tried validating the pages and there were a few fairly minor errors (TYPE and ALT tags missing) but not enough to stop Google I think. I did have a robots.txt file on the more recent site but removed it recently in case it was causing the problem.
The more recent site also has a different title for each page so you would think Google would pick up on that and recognise that the pages were different.
At the moment the only fix I can think of is to detach the pages from the templates.
Bob.
I had a problem with a site with several hundred pages being "ignored" like this and solved it by moving the <h1> tags higher up in the page and rewriting them a bit so that G recognized the content as unique.
They used to read something like
<h1>Example.com's Page About Red Widgets</h1>
and changing them to read
<h1>The Red Widgets Page at Example.com</h1>
seemed to help alot as well.
I'm not sure if I'm allowed to post urls here...perhaps that might shed some light?
Bob.
I had a client that made a site in front page and it looked fine from his computer, but it was broken for everyone else because everything was being called from his own hard drive
<img src="C:\Documents and Settings\User\Desktop\Foo\photo.jpg">
He was going crazy because it looked fine to him, but was broken to everyone else.
Other people I know have viewed both sites with no problems so the pathnames must be OK.
The HTML validator returned an unexpected server error, but I tested pages on W3C and did get some errors as I mentioned before but nothing serious (eg missing 'alt' tags).
Wierd!
Bob.
Patrick, I've seen a lot of pages out there with the snippet bollixed up like that. Nothing to do with linking to the HD - they've just got the alt attribute listed with ... after it in the snippet and it stops short there - that's the whole description.
For the other site, now that I look at the Google entry, I find that the description is just the footer on its own. This is just a set of text-based hyperlinks and a copyright notice. The header on this site (which contains an image with no link or alt tags and text-based hyperlinks) has been ignored. This site has the same title on each page.
Does that give you any more clues?
Bob.
Google dont seem to be liking it anymore or have unknowingly messed up somewhere.
I think G decided that all these pages were too close to one and other. We're waiting right now to see if our fixes did the trick.
There's a little bit more of an insight available now since Google has started showing a text-only version of the cache. When the images are linked, the alt attributes are showing up just as they would if they were regular text links.
So not only is it the factor of the page top being identical throughout the site, but if the alt text happens to be the main keyword phrase for the site and there are a lot of other links with the same anchor text it can go well over the top for percentage of occurences of identical anchor text.
It's harder to spot and not easy to find too many, and it doesn't have the same significance, but alt attributes in graphics that "aren't" links are also turning up here and there - they just look like normal page text so they don't stand out too much and it's harder to catch, especially if there's a lot of text on the page.
I'm trying to get to the bottom of it because I've seen a good number running into problems and I personally always expect the top graphic to link back. Plus, it creates difficulties for people using something like Dreamweaver with a library item up top.
The entire site is hand coded, no templates, librabries or anything else other than straight html and a few images. All of the pages showing this have at least 500-1000 words of content related to the title and meta description of the page and all of these pages have lost their rankings.
OK, so then there's no alt attribute being picked up as link text from the logo that goes to the homepage.
<!-- robots content="noindex" -->
<!-- /robots -->
...which you can wrap around an area of the page that you don't want search engines to index. I'm going to try adding it around my headers, footers and menus to see if it makes any difference.
Any thoughts on whether it should work?
Bob.
What I found was that Google was reading the template area as the 'description' and nothing was in the area. It missed the real 'description' and 'title'.
I've sinced renamed my template area and things are good.
Heh, now I'm starting to worry...
Beth
I have thousands of pages with the same top and I rank great.
100% agree....Webmasterworld has a lot of pages with similar bikini's as well. No problem ranking here.
Mine are still OK, possible because I have used css to position the different high up in the HTML.
Might be worth someone changing a page or two to see if the problem is still there when the similar bits are further down the html.
I would be very surprised if there was a Google penalty of this since, (as someone said earlier), half of the internet must have been created this way. I would assume that the boffs at the 'plex would have considered this. Surely they would know that they would be damaging many legit sites if they penalised this?
