one page access by GB

I couldn't find the thread dealing with this

[shasan]

Hi Guys,

quick question, I haven't submitted to Google yet, but somehow I got indexed by altavista, so I'm guessing this is why my site is being crawled by googlebot. (I don't come up in searches on Google though, which is strange.)

anyway, my concern is that GB is only logging ONE access to my site every time it crawls. Same thing with AV, when it crawls it only seems to like my front page and doesn't seem to follow links.

Is there a reason why it's not following my links? Or is it just because my url hasn't been 'submitted' yet?

I remember there was a thread dealing with this but I couldn't find it after a lot of searching.

Any help would be great, thanks.

[Marcia]

shasan, Alta Vista has nothing to do with Google indexing or crawling, and while submitting is OK, truly the best way to get into the index of any search engine is for your site to be found through links on quality pages that are already in the index.

First word of advice is to submit to quality directories like ODP (which can take a while but still definitely worth doing), and search out some good inbound links for your site from topic-related sites.

While it's not unusual for Google to take the index page of a site first and then more later, if it's one page repeatedly you might want to check out your robots.txt file if you have one to make sure it validates. And also, make sure that your navigation is spiderable.

Those are the first places to look and the first things to do.

[shasan]

thanks marcia, appreciate the help. I checked into some of your points.

I have a robots.txt file but I just uploaded it and it is blank just so I wouldn't get 404's in the future.

<edit>brain fart</edit>

[piskie]

What type of link are you using into the site from the home page? Make sure the type of link you use is spiderable.

[shasan]

I ran the w3c validator, and although the page didn't validate, there are no problems with the main navigation.

The main navigation is a table nested in a cell of the 'header' table and contains basic text links, 4 of them, one in each cell. Fairly simple. In essence, the nest goes like this:

<table>
<tr><td>bunch of other stuff logo blah blah</td></tr>
<tr>
<td>
<table>
<tr>
<td>bullet img</td><td>nav link<td>(repeat 4 times)
</tr>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
<table>

simple a href links, no javascript, no window.status stuff, nothing, just plain old run of the mill links only in table cells.

?

[shasan]

anyone know why this could be? Altavista seems to have crawled those links, I'm not sure why Google isn't.

[netnerd]

Google is just like that.

Id say get more links and give it a couple of weeks.

[shasan]

ok, I guess it's onlly been a couple of weeks since the first crawl.

thx.

[kaled]

Altavista crawled and indexed my site while it was still under development, had no inbound links and had not been submitted. I later changed some file names and some pages were still indexed more than six months after vanishing.

Kaled.

PS
Threads in other forums state that Altavista is merging with ATW (FAST). However, suggested dates have already passed with no difference.