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If I start from the beginning again. Should I redirect my old site to the new site? Should I just ban the googlebot from my present site since it has great rankings in yahoo, msn, altavista, etc.. Do I need to ban the bots from the non-google search engines from visiting the new site? I don't know the best strategy. Or should I try to get my site back on good terms with google. I emailed the reinclusion request today. Thanks!
bad code generally doesn't cause problems
That's as may be, but h**p://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/webmasters/guidelines.html explicitly makes the point "Check for broken links and correct HTML"
I take notice of what they say, and poor HTML is generally simply that the webmaster can't take a few seconds to validate the code. It's a few seconds well-spent.
As a cyncical shopper, I work on the principle that if a site's webmaster produces code that's rushed and not quite right, his site's products may be the same.... <smile>
DerekH
IN your case, I'm betting its bad links, just delele ALL of them in case you aren't sure which one is the bad one, then make sure you vet the new ones more carefully.
Forget gambling, viagra etc, these sites usually have no linking scruples and you will get burnt.
IN your case, I'm betting its bad links, just delele ALL of them in case you aren't sure which one is the bad one, then make sure you vet the new ones more carefully.
Forget gambling, viagra etc, these sites usually have no linking scruples and you will get burnt.
I didn't do it, but I've also seen a site go south with messed up code - even worse than the missing </body> tag, it had an extra <head> section by accident.
Have you tried the W3C Validator (Google it) - it'll check your pages for all sorts of errors, and if you're using templates, it's worth checking out one page before they all end up with the same fault <grin>
DerekH
Not *one* of the 100 passed through without errors--anway, what the W3 calls errors. XHTML and CSS extremists take note: the future is "invalid"; The most successful webmasters do not care for your religious views.
Google certainly didn't pass muster. And, like most others, they also "fail" to declare what version of HTML they were "failing" to write. I was glad to see it. Google appears to write code for uses and browsers, not validators. They have also, like most successful sites, continued to use tables, another bette noir of the all-CSS set.
So, write good code. But good code is functional, compact and easy to maintain, not necessarily valid.
Its different to have
(1) Crucial html errors such as no <body> tags.
(2) Minor errors such as <p> tags inside a <span> tag.
(3) Not be dom3 compliant.
I always try to achive all 3, though not always possible. IE6 does not even render properly all dom3 compliant code.
The point is, not being dom3 compliant, and having errors in your code, are different things. I don't beleive google cares about dom3 compliant, but they do care about errors.
Dom3 compliancy often means less code on the page, so you can present more content per page to google and come in under 100k so its worth doing.
my 2 cents
It seems to me, prejudice against pages with errors can come from two sources, (1) prejudice against it or (2) inability for Google to make heads or tails of it. I don't think (1) is very important. If I were Google, I might watch for errors that will hurt the browsing experience, just as Google should penalize for lots of broken images or links. I suspect that's about the limit of it. With a missing <head> tag, I think Google ought to be in real doubt about what's going on. If they don't understand it, they can't assess it right, and they could be manipulated.
I agree that, in general, Dom3 is good for size. And discipline is the handmaiden to creativity, so long as you don't replace replace creativity entirely.
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From: help@google.com
Thank you for your reply. As we mentioned previously, your sites are not currently penalized, and are included in our search results. To see the results of our search, please visit the following links:
(Links removed)
As you may know, our search results change regularly as we update our
index. However, these processes are completely automated and not
indicative of wrong-doing or penalization of individual sites. Normal
changes you observe may include, but are not limited to, changes in the
ranking of existing sites, sites falling out of the index or getting
dropped for particular keywords, addition of new sites, and fluctuation
between old and new webpage content.
We realize these changes can be confusing. We currently include over eight
billion pages in our index, and it is certainly our intent to represent
the content of the internet fairly and accurately.
While we cannot guarantee that any page will consistently appear in our
index or appear with a particular rank, we do offer guidelines for
maintaining a 'crawler-friendly' site. You can find these guidelines at
h**p://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html. Following these
recommendations may increase the likelihood that your site will show up
consistently in the Google search results.
We appreciate your taking the time to write to us.
Regards,
What was your PR before? I really don't think a little inperfect code or even a couple bad links would cause this unless you were linking to garbage systematically. Check the code of the top 5 sites for most money keywords and they're rife with minor coding errors.
If it does have a penalty, and is not a major site that already has brand recognition or a big client base, etc... I'd consider just starting a new site on a new domian. That would probably be the quickest way.
Yes, they'll respond with something like: "a site can be dropped for the index for a lot of reasons, including penalization".
I think they're having a bad technical trouble. The last email I sent concerning all my links and PR resulted in them saying they "dispatched a notice to an engineer" which sort of sounded like they're doing something.
I have one site that has been written to be extremely compliant, passes AAA bobby tests and the American disability guidelines, has code that has been hand checked so it works consistently on every platform that is has been tested on. Even though this has been given so mich attention W3 still came up with 3 errors which don't come up with other checks don't show.
It seems that the differences between browser compatibility and compliance are irreconsilable. I changed the errors and found that it caused display anomalies which just goes to show that the whole effort to get compliance is too strict. I'd rather have pages that work on browesers than completely compliant code.
I imagine there's lots of places you can submit a page and get keyword density figures, etc.
there is no attribute "BORDERCOLOR"... "HEIGHT"... "BACKGROUND" etc...
Doesn't mean much. These are used by programs like Dreamweaver and are fine.
I'm taking my privacy policy webpage, which is PR4, and removing the closing HTML and BODY. If, at a month or two it's PR0, you owe me a beer.
Deal?
In mid-late December, I thought it might be the canonicalpage / duplicate site content issue, so I removed any pages that were showing as duplicate content as well as removed a large number of similar content pages (print friendly format, etc). Finally, I made sure that my domain name without www redirected to the www.domainname.com version with a 301 redirect - as I was showing both versions in the search results at times. I used the url removal tool to get them immediately taken out.
So, now 2 days ago, my site completely drops out of Google, gone from the directory (I'm in several DMOZ cats), and PR0. My site is still getting spidered by googlebot, but I don't know if that is normal behavior for a PR0 site or not.
Anyone know if PR0 domains usually continue to get spidered by googlebot (but not ranked)?
I again emailed help@google.com yesterday but have gotten no response. I don't know if that is because they are all on the slopes this week, or because they won't respond as my domain is now banned.
I have a feeling I did something to get the boot and that pursuing this is going to ultimately be futile. At some point I'm going to just have to call it quits on this domain, and continue to develop my site from a new domain.
I think the domain got banned, and I'm guessing that when I communicated with Google, they manually reviewed my site, which is what I had expected, and things that I felt were within the Google TOS they felt were too artificial and they banned my site. The thing I am thinking is mainly linking to friends' site that are off topic with sitewide links. I did not think that off topic links would warrant a ban, but if they think that it was someone buying links, then perhaps. I'm still not sure though and hopefully the domain will come back. There is a lot of unique content and a fairly busy discussion forum with very unique discussions that I have to decide if I want to move to a new domain or not. I'm thinking I will start now rather than waste more time, and be careful to be TOTALLY clean from the start. Maybe in 4-5 years the new site will rank where the old one did? Good thing I never quit my day job to do this full time.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domainname\.net
RewriteRule ^(.*) [domainname.net...] [L,R=301]
If that is not the issue, and my site has indeed been penalized, I'm wondering what people think is the best of the following options:
1. Start all over, edit all of the unique content to be slightly different again, and then contact all people who have linked to me and ask for them to move their links to the new appropriate pages
2. Same as #1 above, but use a domain name I registered a few years ago and just haven't used
3. Use a new domain, just copy all of the content over to the new domain, then do a 301 redirect from the old site to the new, and also ask all people who link to me to change their links
4. Use a domain that is a few years old, but hasn't been used for anything and do the same as #3
5. Remove virtually everything from my current domain, except just some bare content, with absolutely nothing that could draw a penalty, and ask Google to re-include my domain?
How long do people think I should wait before doing any of the above to see if there is still some chance that Google just choked on my domain and it will get re-indexed without me doing anything?
>They have also, like most successful sites, continued to use tables, another bette noir of the all-CSS set.
What do you mean by this?
I use CSS and tables together and how I please...have I misunderstood your statement?
.incs inside tables inside .incs inside tables...wonderful...:-) CSS has made my life so much easier it is unbelievable.
And, same as in your case, googlebot keeps coming but the site is gone from the index without a trace. Sent 2 re-inclusion letters but I guess we all know what follows. The good news is that new MSN just started sending 10 times more traffic than i was ever getting from google. My only regret is that if de-listing continues I will loose most of my reciprocal links which i spent lots of time acquiring, and it will eventually affect my position in Yahoo and MSN.
G does no evil – its just us, stupid mortals, who can’t figure its mysterious ways…
