Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I know that in years past that we could get a new site listed into Google in about 60 to 90 days. However, I submitted my new 15 page business site into Google last September (6 months ago) and I am still not listed naturally, and consequently I am paying a fortune in AdWords.
Looking through my logs I see that Googlebot has been coming by monthly since November 2004.
QUESTION:
Has the time to become listed naturally in Google gotten significantly longer?
TIA,
John
No, man. DMOZ Editors don't care about meta tags, trust me.
I am talking about link tags, not meta tags (maybe they do fall under the word meta tag, I just thought they were called link tags)
[w3.org...]
Authors may use the LINK element to provide a variety of information to search engines
Even if google never gives any credit to the Link tags, other search engines might someday or even today. If his goal is to be indexed by google then he shouldn't hold back any possible means of getting indexed, even if it means getting indexed by another search engine (which might like Link tags) first which might help him get indexed by google.
Knowing that it is very unlikely that any benefit is given to meta keywords tags, and also knowing that there is a possibility that they could do your site harm, is it wise to include these tags?If you are an seo working on someone else's site and you are being paid by the hour, adding these tags is very wise and I would do each page separately by hand.
But in any case the keyword tag is 100% offtopic from this thread, so I apologize for following the pointless tangent.
But in any case the keyword tag is 100% offtopic from this thread
Not at all, you just haven't been following the thread properly.
Toecutter is having problems getting Google to list his site. There were a few problems with the formatting of his HTML. Including his incorrect usage of the META keywords tag.
I advised him to remove it, as it's wasn't doing any harm and could have been the cause of Google being unable to read his page.
(this is where you piped in; saying that he should keep meta keywords on the page because they are not used by Google)
FYI: Most of the site is now listed in Google. There is still a problem with one page. However after identifying another rogue piece of HTML, it should hopefully be properly indexed soon.
I saw a list recently of search engines that use keywords and those that don't. This should settle this debate
Not really it's irrelevant to the discussion. We're not talking about the ranking algo here.
The debate between me and steve is whether Google is likely to ignore the keywords when it comes to its bayesian spam analysis (assuming it actually uses bayesian spam analysis which is another debate entirely).
Steve says that it must ignore them.
I totally disagree. When you are using bayesian analysis to decide the likelihood of a web page being spam you need to take the whole page in to account.
Bear in mind that this issue is completely seperate from the ranking algo. Meta keywords are not one of the 100+ factors that Google takes in to account when ranking a page. However, if Google is using bayesian spam analysis, the "spaminess rating" will be one of these 100+ factors.
When performing bayesian spam analysis, you look at the page as a whole to decide the "spaminess rating", you don't exclude anything. Meta keywords, being part of the source of the page are as relevant as anything else. Therefore, indirectly, meta keywords play a small part in the spam analysis.
A bayesian spam analysier looks at the page and judges it's similarity to known spammy pages. It tries to emulate how a human would look at a site to decide if it is spam.
When it comes to spam analysis, you need to look at everything and exclude nothing.
The debate between me and steve is
it's irrelevant to the discussionThe thread title/topic is "How long does it take to get a new site into Google Now?" Addressing that question would be a simple courtesy to The Toecutter who started this thread.
I published a brand new site in November 2004 with just a few pages, around four or so. I gave it 2-3 links (PR2-PR4 i think) from two different sites, and did nothing more than that to promote it.
It was indexed fairly quickly in Google, i didn't really keep an eye to it, but i'd say one or two weeks. Yahoo and MSN took far longer time. It didn't rank anywhere in Google for relevant queries (it targets pretty broad terms, so it's not really a surprise).
In fact, only this month i got my very first referral from a search engine. It was a three word query and a very relevant one at that. Yahoo was the search engine. After that i've had two referrals from Google -- both were searches for the domain name (which is not the site name and not a keyword).
I should add that this site has no technical flaws of any kind - everything is exactly as it should be and it's very spider friendly. User friendly and friendly to people with disabilities and the elderly as well, even. (Friendly to cats and dogs might be to stretch it)
[edited by: claus at 6:04 pm (utc) on Mar. 17, 2005]
The next priority IMO is to get rid of the 5 H1 tags on the root page. As a general rule, if you use H1 header, use one per page, and make it meaningful for users and the bots. Multiple H2 headers are OK.
Assuming that your original "not listed problem" is now solved, you just need some good SEO to get good rankings.
P.S. I just ran your site toe and you will get a lot of errors but just scroll past them all to see your outline. You may or may not choose to fix the errors but I imagine that is something that is going to take considerable time unlike fixing your Header tag problem which should only take a few minutes.
*Don't get obsessed with the Toolbar "green stripe" PR. As a Google rep once allegedly said - its typically 2-3 months out of date and is there for "entertainment purposes" only.
It doesn't matter how well he lures Googlebot, it isn't going to index his site until he gets the homepage problem fixed.
The reason the site wasn't getting indexed in Google was because everyone was linking to his homepage (which is broken). I put a link to one of his subpages and the rest of the site got crawled and indexed soon after.
The thread title/topic is "How long does it take to get a new site into Google Now?" Addressing that question would be a simple courtesy to The Toecutter who started this thread.
With all respect, I was following the discussion and responding to questions made. Where misleading statements have been made, I've corretced them. If you read the thread from start to finish, you will see that.
As for being corteous to toecutter, I've done more for his site than anyone else on this thread. I've made sure his site was indexed by Google and I've told him what the problem is with his homepage.
Some people's half hearted attempts to help him out by linking to his homepage highlight the lack of real SEO expertise that some people here have.
As for being corteous to toecutter, I've done more for his site than anyone else on this thread. I've made sure his site was indexed by Google and I've told him what the problem is with his homepage.You must have missed message 21, where BigUns pointed out the problem on the home page that would have caused a site not to be indexed.
You must have missed message 21, where BigUns pointed out the problem on the home page that would have caused a site not to be indexed.
No I saw that. I'm doubtful that was an actual problem with the indexing. Unless the exact string "noindex" appears, googlebot should ignore it. Although, you're right, it needed fixing and it was fixed a while ago. Let's just say it wasn't the only problem.
Unless the exact string "noindex" appears, googlebot should ignore it.When Google receives an undiscernible robots directive via robots.txt or the meta tag it does the responsible thing and does not index the page (in my experience, anyway). If your robots.txt file has incorrect syntax or formatting, or returns something other than 200 or 404, that will also keep you from being indexed.
If your robots.txt file has incorrect syntax or formatting, or returns something other than 200 or 404, that will also keep you from being indexed
None of the other things you mentioned would affect indexing, only ranking.
How would you know what I mentioned? Have you been reading toecutter's sticky mail?
(as the saying goes: "I've shown you mine...")
Yesterday, a site:toecutter'sdomain.com search returned only the url listing of the homepage. Today, it brings up the entire site (I think), but the index is still a url only listing.
Toecutter, did you only change the robots tag or did you also write to Google?
I deleted robots tag, deleted KW tags, and made it a little less spammy. About the same time it appeared in DMOZ but I did not write to Google.
The next priority IMO is to get rid of the 5 H1 tags on the root page. As a general rule, if you use H1 header, use one per page, and make it meaningful for users and the bots. Multiple H2 headers are OK.Assuming that your original "not listed problem" is now solved, you just need some good SEO to get good rankings.
Dumped 4 of the 5 H1 tags and cleaned up text a little. Now I am going to spend some time researching seo techniques in an effort to improve ranking.
TC
The thread headline is actually a very interesting one - not so much the indexing, but rather the ranking (the "listing"). I've made a controlled experiment in this regard and shared it above. Now, should i start a new thread with the same subject?
Any opinions?
Always nice to read other webmasters' opinions on google and SEO.
I launched a brand new site last week, in which the brand new domain name had been purchased a couple weeks prior. The site was found and spidered by google bot and indexed (very deeply of course) within a week, and I had zero incoming links to that site at the time. But yeah, it's easy to point google to your site, but damn hard to get decent positioning depending on your competition.
Anyways, I disagree with the statement that having meta keywords can hurt your site. I have a hard time NOT adding meta keywords out of habit. I don't think they will help nor hinder, however you never know if SE's will start using them again, and it's not exactly a difficult thing to add to your pages.
Toecutter - good luck with your site. Just keep adding fresh content, work on getting some good incoming links (think quality, not quantity, but sometimes you have to go with a bit of quantity), and vary up the anchor text for those incoming links. Also, one way links to your site are ideal, but know that you WILL have to reciprocate most of the time - even the most mediocre webmasters are starting to learn about link popularity and won't give up a free link. Other than those things, play fair, keep your SEO clean, and be patient.
MW
