Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I'm new to this forum but have read loads of posts in the past that have been able to help me, but now I have a question of my own!
I have a website (not allowed to post the URL am I?) which I've recently been trying to do a lot of SEO on. I submitted an XML sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools, but for every page (hundreds of them), including my home page, I'm getting a "redirect error". Because of this (I think this is the only problem), none of my pages are indexed by Google.
I had a small piece of PHP code that redirected some pages from HTTPS to HTTP, but I removed that in case that was the problem. My URLs are also rewritten in .htaccess to make them more search engine friendly, because they had a lot of querystrings. The URLs in the sitemap go straight to the rewritten URL though.
Does anyone have any ideas why this is happening, or what I can do to fix it?
Many thanks
Have you used a server header checker to see what your server's response is, technically, for the urls that are being reported as errors? There are ways to get the your intended content to show up in a browserthat do not give the correct status information to googlebot, so it's good to check the actual http headers.
There are free tools available to do this - one is a Firefox add-on called LiveHTTPHeaders
Ok I took your advice, checked the http headers and I've managed to fix it, finally! It's been like this for months. I had some code that redirected if a session wasn't started, which for some bots, like Yahoo it didn't affect, but google it does.
I've got rid of this code, which them got rid of the errors. I then found another problem, which meant only the first 700 characters or so of my site were shown to the bot (up to the </head>), which after a few hours, has also been fixed! Hopefully it will be indexed quite soon :D
Thank you so much!
