Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Recently we have found that Google does NOT LIKE these sites. When I say they don't
like them I mean that simple site:mydomainname searches in Google show domain name
only with no Cached results, no Title, no brief Description. I cannot understand why these pages have been penalized.
1) They are written in JSP which as I understand (from google's own guidelines) should not be a problem.
2) They have unique content, (except the parts that are inherently templated, names of div's and css rules mostly)
3) They have unique title's, meta-descriptions, etc...
Possible reasons they aren't listed Google (MY THEORIES):
1) We don't redirect non-www domain names to www domain names. (Could this have really penalized them so?)
2) We allow them to have home pages that aren't redirected to the domain name (www.<mydomainname>.com/ =www.<mydomainname>.com/home.jsp) for example (A concern but hopefully not critical)
3) A website on the same IP address was delisted for doing some things against Google's guidelines, but has since been relisted. (They wouldn't penalize all website's from the same IP address would they?)
4) We are using a templated system, so there are some elements that are created the same way for different websites. <div> tags and css rules will be the same.
Has anyone encountered a problem like this before? Especially with Template Websites, or with sites that exist on the same IP address as one that was delisted?
Powdork, here are the responses to your questions...
1) I will see if I can determine whether the Googlebot has come around for these sites by inspecting the log files.
2) I will see this as well...
3) We do not have robots.txt files for each of these websites. If one tried to go to a page that didn't exist it throws a 500 error because of the construction of our web.xml (I believe)
Thanks for your response.
[edited by: tedster at 6:02 pm (utc) on Jan. 26, 2006]
[edit reason] remove product details [/edit]
Justsnooping,
We need more details. Were the websites moved to a new host? If so;
1.Is Googlebot no longer spidering the sites, or have the pages gone url only despite being spidered? Has Gbody visited any pages, or requested robots.txt?
2. Has Slurp been visiting the pages? Good Crawls?
3. Is there a robots.txt file? If so, is it properly syntaxed. If not, is the new host serving the proper response (404 page not found)? Use a 'header checker tool' for this.
Typically, changes that only involve the nameservers don't have an effect with Google so the first thing to check would be problems spidering the pages on the new host's servers. You can use a 'spider simulator' to check this sort of thing. Also consider the reputation of the new website builder. Search G for them and their domain(s). You can also check to see how other clients of the host are indexed in Google.
Even if they weren't moved, these are some things to look for. Keep in mind I know very little about javaserver pages so there could be many server issues I know nothing about there.
[edited by: tedster at 7:21 pm (utc) on Jan. 26, 2006]
Rob
Sometimes you can turn up important clues there.
Robert
