Forum Moderators: open
My mom who uses the sames hosting service as I do (so I know how to check her logs!) runs a PR5 site and has googlebot all over it! The only meta tag she uses is the keyword tag. I should probably get on her about adding a description tag, but that's a different story. :-)
Any thoughts? Any additional info I need to provide to get some ideas on why googlebot isn't visiting my site?
Thanks,
Kris
To get Googlebot to visit your site, you need links from other sites. Concentrate on getting other sites to link back to yours, possibly by trading links.
As far as the robots meta tags, I would just toss them. I don't think they do any good, and I'm sure some people here will agree. It may not be a bad idea to get your mom a description tag, though, as they can help a little. :-)
I guess I'm kinda confused...no googlebot = no PR, yet you have PR. Hmmm. Are you sure you didn't miss a bot visit or two?
or you can just make sure you have an incoming link and some patience
Googlebot will also visit urls posted here [google.com] ;)
I went back and checked my stats month by month just to make sure I didn't miss a visit. I did a search for "googlebot" and came up empty each month.
Then I did a search on my mom stats. She had 8 visits by googlebot in August and 4 so far in September.
I use the Google toolbar and that says I have a PR4. However, my PR4 ranking is relatively new.
Even before I got the PR4, I was always pleased about my ranking in the search engines especially Google. Even the strangest search terms brought up my site as #1.
That in itself is kind of nice because I don't spend anytime trying to submit it to search engines anymore. Talk about a time saver!
Also, I do have some good incoming links as noted when a run a marketleap report. My mom's page does have a lot more incoming links, however. Thus her higher PR.
Jcoronella, I do have my URL in my profile and who is googleguy?
Perhaps more patience is required before I start seeing googlebot in my logs?
Thanks again,
Kris
I do have my URL in my profile and who is googleguy?
Sorry KriskD, that was a joke (as was the link to the spam report) GoogleGuy is a google employee (or several) that hangs out here and solicits spam reports from people.
Patrick is right, a link from a PR 5 will bring googlebot around in a matter of days. Having a PR 4 itself should bring googlebot around at least once a month.
I read through your link to the spam report and of course stayed away from submitting my site to that!
Mom was one of the first people to link to me, and I could tell immediately her PR5 site helped me out. Pretty good for a 62-year-old woman, huh? :-)
Since my PR4 is relatively new, perhaps I'll be seeing more of googlebot in September.
Thanks guys!
Kris
Googlebot will also visit urls posted here ;)
Any idea when they take action on the bad boys? I tried to start a post that apparently wasn't approved about five days ago. My question was..
I know of one site that uses a boatload of hidden text and they also have sponsered(paid)links with google. Is money playing a role here? Sure wish someone could answer this one:)
Pretty good for a 62-year-old woman, huh?
Umm... Do you mean to say that older women are otherwise useless, helpless, and clueless?
Tell that to Hillary Clinton, Barbara Boxer, Elizabeth Dole, Carly Fiorina, Barbara Walters, Martha Argerich, etc...
As a 32-year-old woman, I can hope I will still be as quick minded and sharp on the computer as my mom. I meant those words with the utmost respect for my incredibly intelligent mother and others just like her.
Thanks, Mom, for sharing my interest in web page creation and the Internet in general. It always makes for interesting and educational conversations.
Kris
One of my sites has the exact same problem. It has been spidered by Googlebot months ago, hence the PR4, but I haven't seen any sign of the bot in ages. This site was started in April of this year...and with all that's been going on with Google this year, I don't know what the problem is.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. My site started in June. I imagine in time googlebot will start showing up!
Kris
As a 32-year-old woman, I can hope I will still be as quick minded and sharp on the computer as my mom.
As a 40 year old man who can't remember where he was two weeks ago, I have a slim chance of being that quick by 62!
;) Y
Now if I can only remember where I left my rascal [abervegas.com]...
One thing is fairly certain:
There's a daily, weekly, and a 3-4 week update schedule.
A really good way to get quality links for your site is to find sites that are similar, and type in "link:URL" at Google. Google will only show PR4+ pages that link to the sites.
I guess I wonder how much value those buttons really have.
Kris
That's all they do.
The frequency of page updates seems to depend on PR. A PR4 will get updated monthly. Higher PR sites get more frequent updates. Under pre-Dominic Google pages with a PR of less than 4 seemed to get updated every three months.
DON'T trust the toolbar for accurate indication of current PR. I'm told that it isn't right yet.
As for the latest suggestion, my web page content is updated frequently. As of right now, it has been couple days now -- Thursday was my last update, but I will be doing some moderate changes (versus major) today.
As far as the toolbar being inaccurate, I sure hope my PR isn't actually less than 4!
Kris
One thing is fairly certain:
There's a daily, weekly, and a 3-4 week update schedule.
I'm seeing EXACTLY 3 weeks in my logs. This is the first I've heard someone else post this observation.
When I started a new site, I had no visits from googlebot for the first week. I learned about this trick, submitted everyday for a week just once, it came every day and on day 7 spidered all the pages.
jd
Not sure if this has been mentioned, if you enter your domain name, say widgets.com in the toolbar search area, googlebot will visit for sure that day or the next...
Doesn't hurt to try it. That would be a cool trick..anyone else?
Not sure if this has been mentioned, if you enter your domain name, say widgets.com in the toolbar search area, googlebot will visit for sure that day or the next...
One thing is fairly certain:
There's a daily, weekly, and a 3-4 week update schedule
I'm seeing that from logs and updates to a variety of sites. At the recent San Jose SES conference one of the Google Panelists mentioned this exact schedule, which confirmed to me what I was already seeing.
She confirmed this in the context of a question about database freshness. There was someone else there, a blonde fellow, I don't know who he was, who asked a follow-up question using jargon you can only learn here at WW, and she declined to answer because the question involved too many specifics.
In retrospect, for someone with as much knowledge as he had, it was pretty lame/naive to ask a question about specifics.
Hey, that person was at several forums that I attended, asked fairly sophisticated questions at each (albeit naive), but has yet to pipe up here at WW. Some people share, some don't.
Is that another joke? Or if its not its a very narrow view of googleguys role here. From memory when googleguy started hanging out here a lot WebmasterWorld was deluged with "spam reports" from posters in the hope that Google would ban a competitor.
I got the impression (though maybe im wrong) that the spam report URL was provided as a way for people to do this off-board so the amount of spam reports on the actual board would be reduced to almost nothing. In the early stages both moderators and googleguy publicized the URL, to reduce the strain on the board.
Its possibly a little unfair if the above is correct to accuse googleguy of over- encouragement of spam reporting. It just transfers the problem to google rather than WebmasterWorld which is fine by me!
Chiyo: I am almost always joking. Humor, not ire, intended.
