How do I know if site is being penalized

Read all postings, how do I know if problems on site

[ramnyc]

This is a fascinating website, i'm pretty new to the whole thing and I'm wondering how do you know if there is something on your site (content or links,e tc) that are "problems"?

Also, how can I tell when/if my different pages are being crawled and indexed?

[frenzy77]

Hi ramnyc:)

Well as far as knowing if your site being penalized, you probably won't know. Engines use different algorythms(complicated formulas) to determine this and they are constantlym changing. So you might be high on the search engines today, and way deep in the
search engines tomorrow.

You can probably try changing something on your site and then updating it to see if your ranking changes. But the only thing is, you still might not know because if you change it today and next week it ranks higher it might not be because of your modification of your site last week, it could be something you did in the past and the algorythm is now accepting something you did in the past as good.

As far as your question on being crawled and indexed,i believe that the "robot" that crawls your site is listed as "blahblah bot" as the user agent in your server logs. *I listed it as "blahblah bot" because we are not supposed to drop names here on this site, so it depends on the engine bot.

>Also, you should'nt worry about being indexed because your site will be indexed if you have other sites linking to you.

Hope this helps you out:)

frenzy77

[ramnyc]

Thank you for responding, some of this is like a foreign language, I am reading as many postings as I can to try to pull it all together.

[gdawg]

You can look at your log files to determine if and when search engine spiders are crawling your site. The name of the top 3 spiders are Googlebot, Slurp (Yahoo) & MSNBot.