Google problems with my site

Google won't index or rate my site. Why?

[tulling99]

I get about 5000 visitors from yahoo, and about the same from MSN each month. (total traffic is 35 000 uniques/month). At the same time I get about 2 (two) visitors from Google. This is not normal. Google won't index my site, nor give it a PR though I have at least 50 links from PR-sites, and lotsa inbound links. Even got a DMOZ link. By the way I have been indexed before, but now removed.

I have a few ideas why:

1. I have some "lent" content that I actually found through google. I have changed it some, but It's mostly like the original content.

2. I made my site using frontpage, and by using a html-analyzer I find hundreds of html-errors. Dunno how correct them. But site seems ok from a human eye perspective.

Any tips?

[edited by: jatar_k at 4:25 pm (utc) on Sep. 16, 2006]
[edit reason] no urls thanks [/edit]

[Quadrille]

If one of the people you ripped off has complained to Google, that would get you de-listed.

But that's unlikely; ripoffs in your niche are so frequent that your site is unlikely to particularly attract a complaint.

More likely is your 'link exchange' policy - reciprocal linking can severely damage your site; check that you are not linking to c***sites, and be sure to leave any multiple site exchange schemes, which are a Google suicide note.

Your listing will never be good in Google, as very similar content appears on 100,000 sites or more - but you must have done something wrong to get a ban.

[tedster]

First thought -- if you've only created the html with FrontPage and never edited the raw code, it is unlikely that any errors are severe enough to obstruct crawling. You can be sure -- I suggest checking the html mark-up with the W3C HTML Validator [validator.w3.org].

The issue with errors is that the human eye my see no problem with the way a browser renders the page. But browsers and spiders are two different kinds of user agent. The types of error recovery that they use are not the same, partly because a spider is not generating visual layout.

So you cannot assume that a good rendering in a browser, or even in many different browsers, means that there is no error severe enough to trip up a search engine spider.

Second, it's not only similar content across various domains that can be problematic, there can also be issues within your own site, created through Title tags or Meta Description tags that are not unique to the page. Another indexing obstacle can come through more than one url pointing to the same content. Even a different query string tacked on the end of the url technically makes it a different url. There is a discussion of some of these issues in current thread:

Duplicate Content - Get it right or perish [webmasterworld.com]

Note that these kinds of "duplicate content" issues have become more mission-critical to Google indexing in recent times.