Forum Moderators: mack
Background info: My site has been online since Jan. 2003..it's a fan page/personal web site, and it's a large site - 300+ pages using SSI. Apache server.
Now, for my questions:
- My site gets vistied by Googlebot every once in a while, but every time it visits, it only has one hit:
Googlebot (Google) 1 hit(s) 8.92 KB 10 May 2003 - 06:46
Why is this? My site *just* went into Google last week after being online for five months. I do searches on my keywords and some of my pages are right at the top of the results (yay!) How can this be if Googlebot only has one hit every time it visits?
- My site gets crawled by Inktomi nearly every day. What is Inktomi? I'm assuming this is what feeds MSN's search?
- My site has been in the DMOZ directory since Feb. My site is at the bottom, with NO green bar page rank icon. I read somewhere that this means your site has been penalized. I don't understand this, as my site has no hidden links, spam, or any other garbage. It's just an innocent personal page! Any way to correct this?
- Another DMOZ question... I've noticed that when I do a search for myurl.com, all of these "weird" directories use the DMOZ directories. What is the purpose of all these other web sites using DMOZ's links? Isn't one site enough? :)
- How can I get my images included in Google's image search? My site has a lot of photo galleries - all pics with captions and ALT tags. Do I just have to wait longer?
- When I look at my access logs, I often see something like this: default.ida followed by a bunch of numbers. I saw that someone else on this board asked what it was, and the response was that it was a server with a virus trying to access the site? I don't understand that...Could someone explain further?
Thanks!
The Googlebot issue requires a bit more log analysis - you need to be sure that the bot is going beyond your front page - is your server returning correct codes, have you inadvertently blocked bots through robots.txt, are your URL's spiderable? All these things need looking at if you are sure that Googlebot is not going beyond your index page. Use the site search here to read up on all of these things.
Inktomi is a spider just as Googlebot is. Yes, they provide some results to MSN, amongst others, and were recently bought out by Yahoo! - they are expected to begin providing results for Y! by the end of the year - Google currently 'power' Y! search.
DMOZ doesn't have green bars - you mean the Google Directory, which is fed by DMOZ but modified, and ranked, by Google. You are unlikely to have been penalised - this is just Googles ranking of the DMOZ results. As traffic, and links, grow, so will your page rank. Read up on this also.
DMOZ results are free for anyone to use via their RDF data dump, hence the countless directories that base their back-end on the DMOZ results. Many just use a selected chunk/field of the data for niche directories. A DMOZ listing is important in itself, but there is also a trickle-down benefit from these other smaller directories. Not all, but some.
Google image search - yes, just wait - as long as thet are Alt-tagged and captioned accurately.
Default.ida, and many others, are caused by viruses/exploits/worms such as Code-Red - they are automatically probing servers for weaknesses. Only worry about this if you're running your own server - if not, just trust/hope that your host is up to speed on such things.
Hope some of this helps. Just spend most of your life here and things will soon drop into place.
Mat
