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Here is what I think that I did wrong. I added some links pointing to pages on my site to the right side of my index page, BUT I positioned and styled them with CSS - straight code. I use DWMX but since I have been learning CSS lately, I spend most of my time in code view. Anyway, I typed in my list into the code and styled it with CSS. Looked fine in the browser. Great. Done.
Here is the proposed criminality, IF CSS is not employeed, the text is white on a white background UH-ohhhhhh! Fumble!
Is this a "banning/penalty to be administered at our earliest convenience" type thingo? Or am I being paranoid?
Oh-- why do I think I am banned? I looked on Marketleap and my site shows nothing in google, just as if it had never been spidered. I got PR it's been spidered.
What do I do? I apologize for the length, I was just having so much fun sharing my paranoia.
eTN
am I being paranoid?
Probably. Most anything styled with CSS should not be a problem (except, of course, unless done for purely deceptive purposes). If it were, Google wouldn't have much to index.
looked on Marketleap
Why not go right to the source? Do something like...
site:www.yourdomain.com -asdfghj
...and see what it returns.
If nothing shows up, then start investigating.
Jim
I did as you suggested -- nothing, nada, zip.
Now what?
This is my first site to have a problem, I don't know where to start.
Any direction will be greatly appreciated.
Kaled.
It was an honest mistake, I hope that you are right and I hope that the "accidental" hidden text was the actual problem.
Just curious why you should be proud and not embarrased :)
Eric,
1) You imply that your site has some PR. Does the toolbar show PR when you go to your site?
2) You say "IF CSS is not employeed", but first "looked fine in the browser". Guess I'm a bit confused here. From what I inferred, you have a page with a white background and drop out text (white text on a colored field of some sort) on top of that. Is this the situation?
If the answer to 1) is yes, the site isn't banned. If the answer to 2) is yes, the site shouldn't have any sort of penalty. If both answers are yes, then it's time to look at other possibilities before jumping to the dreaded Google ban conclusion. The might be other reasons for the "just as if it had never been spidered" statement.
Can you clarify the two points?
Jim
1) You imply that your site has some PR. Does the toolbar show PR when you go to your site?
2) You say "IF CSS is not employeed", but first "looked fine in the browser". Guess I'm a bit confused here. From what I inferred, you have a page with a white background and drop out text (white text on a colored field of some sort) on top of that. Is this the situation?
I guess that I phrased that confusedly (is that a word?), allow me to restate and see if I can convey my meaning.
1. I have had this site up for sometime, infact, it should have been spidered right around the time that google started having its problems way back when. Do you remember those days?
2. After Google "got out" of its funk, the site got some PR. I have since acquired some backlinks. and PR has increased.
3. The site structure is Index->Location->individual location pages. I didn't understand how PR worked when I set this up. Now that I do understand, I tried to rectify the problem by putting links to the individual location pages FROM the Index page.
4. the code is <ul><li><a href="mysite.com/location1> location1</a></li>then onto location2, location3, etc.
5. This code is at the end of the document, but is placed on the page using CSS. If you look at the DW layout window, the unordered list <ul> is at the bottom, but you can't see it because it is white on white.
6. Now in the browser it appears the way that it should, i.e. in the sidebar that is black with blue text.
It is very likely that this is not the problem it is just a guess. But something is wrong because the site doesn't show up for anything.
I am sorry that this is so long, I just want to try to show you with words. I hope that I haven't failed miserably.
That was kind of a joke, but I guess what I meant was that I must be doing something, I guess just not the right thing.
As for being embarrassed, not an easy thing to embarrass me I'm afraid. I know that I don't kow anything, but I am willing to learn and with learning comes mistakes. It was once said that we learn much more from failure than success.
I'd rather have success, but sometimes, most times, failure must come first.
Anyway...
(And 'confusedly' is as good a word as any; it's what gets spoken most here when talking about how we think Google might work, so take all I say here in that vein.)
1) The toolbar shows that the site has some PR, so it ain't -- at least shouldn't be -- banned.
2) The DW layout window shouldn't matter at all. "In the browser it appears the way that it should" is what should matter. Blue text on a black field on a white background? Hey, those are design elements that have been around before Guttenberg. You should also be okay here (unless there are some DW quirks, CSS quirks or other browser quirks I'm not aware of or overlooked).
So, why might Google not be spidering the site? A few things to investigate, not necessarily in order (and some are simple stupid things but easily overlooked):
1) Do you have access to your site logs? Can you tell if googlebot or any other search engine bot has been visiting the site? (You say you have some links, so bots should be stopping by.) If so, can you see which pages they are visiting or if they might be getting stuck at a certain point?
2) Do you have a robots.txt file? Might it be disallowing access to friendly bots?
3) Any meta robots tags such as "noindex" in the page heads?
4) The <a href="mysite.com/location1> location1</a> links in the added code look simple and easy enough for a bot to follow; nothing that should stop them here. Try running the index page through Brett's Sim Spider tool [searchengineworld.com]. You'll see what an SE spider sees; check the 'Link' section at the bottom of the results to see if all your links are showing up and spiderable.
5) Oh, how long has the site been live? Oops, I see the answer: "I have had this site up for sometime". So it shouldn't be a matter of Google just knowing a fairly new site is there and just not having gotten around to fully indexing it.
Can't think of anything else offhand at the moment though there's got to be more things to rule out. Take care of these first and I'm sure some other folks will be around with suggestions.
It was once said that we learn much more from failure than success.
Yep. If it was something you did at least it was because you did something.
And hey, with all the folks with all the expertise on WW you'll get it worked out soon.
Jim
Unfortunatly, getting a site banned is a costly mistake and one I personally wouldn't want to cut my teeth on and then explain to the boss why we are not getting anymore Google traffic. OUCH!
If it was the hidden text, and you cleaned it up you should be right back in after the 30 day ban expires.
Good Luck!
You say...
If you look at the DW layout window, the unordered list <ul> is at the bottom, but you can't see it because it is white on white.
And...
Now in the browser it appears the way that it should, i.e. in the sidebar that is black with blue text.
The second part is fine, text syled with CSS to be blue on black. Guess I'm not understanding the first part: Why is DW displaying the list as white on white? Is it possible to set it black on white in DW and then use CSS to style it?
I think I missed something here.
Kaled.
1) Do you have access to your site logs? Can you tell if googlebot or any other search engine bot has been visiting the site? (You say you have some links, so bots should be stopping by.) If so, can you see which pages they are visiting or if they might be getting stuck at a certain point?
2) Do you have a robots.txt file? Might it be disallowing access to friendly bots?3) Any meta robots tags such as "noindex" in the page heads?
4. Spidering
Concerning the white on white situation changed that, it is now default blue.
Thanks for the help
The relative links are incorrectly formed...
<a href="http://location1.html/">
Should be something like...
<a href="location1.html">
or...
<a href="location/location1.html">
The http: that DW is throwing in is messing everything up.
>>Should I change it to full? - [mysite.com...]
That shouldn't be necessary if there's a way to get DW to correctly write the relative links (maybe somebody else can answer this part?) Otherwise it wouldn't hurt to use the full url, just gets to be an annoyance when working with a copy of the site on your local machine.
I was mistaken, in the code it looks like this:
<li><a href="location.html">Location</a></li>
however, in the Search Engine Spidering Simulator that you provided shows:
[location.html...]
I am more than a bit confused.
The View Source appears to be correct, so apparently DW is loading it correctly, but the spider is (at least is seems to me) seeing something different.
I thought that we had it, but alas, the quest continues.
I must say that I appreciate all your help, but cannot in good conscience ask you to continue. I feel that you have done too much already.
<added> I think that I found the problem:
<a href="/location.html">
I looked at another site and noticed that the spider was rendering one link with the ERROR, yet another was correct.
The difference? this little fella "/" </added>
<more> that forward slash "/" was definitely the culprit. I changed it and now the Spider simulator is reading it correctly. I guess now I just have to wait and see if ole Googley picks it up THANKS AGAIN FOR THE HELP EVERYONE! :)</more>
[edited by: Eric_in_Tennessee at 9:30 pm (utc) on Nov. 1, 2003]
Have you read this thread [webmasterworld.com...]
Also have you checked your logs to check you are serving pages to Google OK. I had a site that dissapeared from the index and I found that the site went through a lengthy period of responding with 501 server errors. When the site was OK again it had PR according to the toolbar but was not in the index for a few weeks.
If your site has PR (yep), then why isn't at least the main page popping up when you do a...
site:www.yourdomain.com -asdfgh
Something?has to be? indexed somewhere, somehow for PR to be reflected, doesn't it?
Haven't read through the thread cited by MyWifeSays, maybe you can find something there.
Jim
Site had been there for a year. No tricks, great content, design. Link exchanges, paid links.
PR used to be 8 now it dropped to 6, but no where to be found unless you type domain name, domain.com or the full title of my site.
Any help will be appreciated
If I figure it out I will post the remedy ASAP. Thanks again for all the help everyone.
JB- I read through that thread that MyWifeSays referenced, but I didn't really take anything away from it. Apparently some, a lot, of people feel that GoDaddy.com has a problem with hosting concerning 301 redirects or something like that. I don't host with GoDaddy so I know that is not my problem.
Maybe my site just sucks and Google hates it :)
Oh well, it is hosted in a place that doesn't give me access to raw log files, like I would know what to do with them if I had them. :(
I am learning, cut me some slack.
good day all---->
3. The site structure is Index->Location->individual location pages.
Then...
4. the code is <ul><li><a href="mysite.com/location1> location1</a></li>
That doesn't pan out with the URL's you have specified :-
<a href="mysite.com/location1> location1</a>
Surely <a href="./location1/page1.html"> location1</a> or even <a href="mysite.com/location1/page1.html"> location1</a> would be more appropriate.
Just an observation
Paul
www.mysite.com/location.html refers to the links that I added to the index page so that my users (and PR) didn't have to go through the location page.
As I type this in, I see the confusion. Index-->location---> state pages
www.mysite.com/state-page.html as opposed to /location.html would probably made it more clear - my bust.
Does that make since? Sorry to make that confusing :(
So did you move these pages or have they always been in the current location?
Paul
used to be:
Index---> Location Page ---> State Page
now:
Index---> Location Page ---> State Page
AND
Index---> State Page
Does that make sense?
I added the links to the state pages so that pr would slide down directly to the state pages, rendering a higher PR for the individual state pages. I wonder if this hasn't backfired on me.
Persoanlly I would have done a '302' temporary redirect or a '301' permanent redirect, change all inbound links (internal and external) and wait for the PR to catch up or filter across.
It's not too late to put that in place, then you can pull down the pages from their old location saving space and bandwidth while transferring your PR to the new pages.
Ive seen many discussions about what type of redirect is best for certain situations, perhaps someone else can advise the best for todays trends.
Paul
Either I am not making myself clear about what I did, or I just don't understand what you are saying. I am pretty new at this and don't know anything about redirects.
In my situation, I did not add any new content. I only added some internal links on index page pointing to third tier pages.
