An unresolved indexing problem

I have two sites Google refuses to index

[allanp73]

Hi,
For the past 6-8 months, I've been trying to get Google to index two sites. Each site has about 30-40 links pointing to them from sites indexed by Google. One of the two sites has a DMOZ link and has appeared in Google's directory for about 4 months. However, it and the other have never been indexed. I can't figure out why Google refuses to visit the sites (I have checked my log reports the Googlebot will make 1 hit then leaves never coming back.) I reviewed the code 20 times and can't figure out what the problem is. I posted this problem on Webmaster World in September and was told to create a robots.txt file, this has not fixed the problem either.

Please help!

[edited by: Marcia at 4:14 pm (utc) on Dec. 12, 2002]
[edit reason] Please see forum charter [/edit]

[jimbeetle]

hetzeld, don't think doctype is a factor for spiders. If it were many sites would never be crawled. And I ran a few of the pages through the searchengineworld sim spider and it read them well, the missing tr tag doesn't appear to be a factor.

So Allan, looks like everything is being ruled out. What did you do to incur the Mighty One's wrath?

[allanp73]

I don't know. But just in case I modified the pages to add this <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> code.

One last possibility would be that I'm on Google's spam list. This could have happened. When I first created the site I accidently created a text which was the same color as the background. The main background was green and I created a td with white background and green text. I noticed the mistake and corrected it, but only after the first time Google visited the site. However, Google never came back to see that I corrected this mistake.

If the site is on a spam list, how do I get it off the list? How do I know if this is the reason? Googleguy any comments?

[jimbeetle]

Green text on a white background shouldn't be considered spammy even if the overall page background is green. Reversed out text, drop out text, whatever you want to call is basic page design both on the web and in print. If your text was readable Google probably wouldn't consider that hidden text.

So, what's next. There was an eclipse last week, haven't heard of extensive sunspot activity. Maybe the sites' auras are the wrong color.

Don't give up. Somebody will figure it out soon.

[jk3210]

>>Reversed out text, drop out text, whatever you want to call is basic page design both on the web and in print. If your text was readable Google probably wouldn't consider that hidden text.<<

I'll second that.

95% of my pages have a white background and a upper table cell with white text reversed out with a colored background .jpg for that cell.

No problems with rankings.

[allanp73]

I appreciate all the help, but the problem remains.
I am considering buying new domain names and building two new sites. I will lose the 6-8 months worth of marketing work that went into finding links and building the sites, but it seems to be the only way to get these sites onto Google.:(

[allanp73]

Update:
I just checked my logs and found that Google visited the two sites on the 12th but only 2 hits were recorded for each. I imagine these were for the robots file and the index. It seems as though the Googlebot doesn't like what it sees. Why? I don't know. I have tried every suggestion, but still I can't seem to encourage the Googlebot to fully index these two sites. I work on many other sites all hosted with the same server and never had this problem before.
I need some more suggestions. Does Googleguy feel like making any? :)

[hetzeld]

Hi allanp73,

As I wrote in one of my emails, there was an uncorrect <table> tag, with no opening <tr>, on one of your sites.
This could prevent Googlebot to read the content of your <table>, which incidentally contains all your text...

Did you correct this mistake?

Dan

[allanp73]

Yes, I repaired the code problem. I ended up recoding the other site just in case a similiar problem existed with it.
I checked this code and used a hirable spider to walk through the site to see if it produced any errors.
It seems fine, still the Googlebot doesn't seem satisfied.
I also created a sub-domain with completing different code and content and submitted it to Google, but I couldn't tell if Google tried to spider it specifically.

[wakao]

How many links do you have on the home page? Google suggest to create a page with no more than 100 links on it. Might that be a problem?

[allanp73]

8 links. I don't think this was ever a problem. I always try to keep the number of links on the main page to a minimum.