Google Is Killing Me

[HorsepowerFreak]

I own my own business and have had my web-site up for 3 years now. I started using Google Adwords for promotion and slowly turned it down until now it is still active but not enabled. Their robot never seems to deep scan my site for information.

On an average day I get the following:
Yahoo 1100 referrals
MSN 550 referrals
AltaVista 30 referrals
Google 25 referrals

What is going on? Yahoo and MSN seem to deep scan properly.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.
Chris.

[sem4u]

How many links do you have to your website? It sounds like you need a load more.

[simonuk]

All my sites that are at least 2 years old have ridden through every google update with flying colours. Sounds to me like something is missing from your site.

Google plays quite heavily on links to you so that is something worth looking into.

Also make sure if you have a .htaccess or that kind of script that you haven't made a mistake which is preventing google from accessing your site properly.

Another thing it might be is you've been penalised for something google didn't like.

Could also be that you're using mysql or something and google doesn't like the way you've done it.

That should get you started anyway.

[Marshall Clark]

Also do a search for some unique word combinations from your site in quotes to make sure that someone hasn't co-opted your content and reposted it somewhere. That is happening quite a bit lately.

[luckychucky]

Hey Marshall Clark:
Check out a very cool free tool for searching out duplicate content...

[edited by: rogerd at 5:34 pm (utc) on Sep. 27, 2004]
[edit reason] No URLs, please... [/edit]

[HorsepowerFreak]

Thanks for all the feedback. I should have a lot of links pointing to this site. You may be right that Google doesn't like something about the site. The only thing that strikes me odd is that Googlebot hits my site every single day but only hits one page. Each time it's a different page and these are old pages that I no longer want people to see.

Since I have 5,000 pages, I'll be 13 years older before this spider finished crawling my site.

Can I post the site name here or is that not allowed? I'd like someone to just take a peek and see if there's anything obvious.

[trillianjedi]

Can I post the site name here or is that not allowed?

That's not allowed here, but it shouldn't be necessary.

Can you give us some info about your link structure/site navigation?

Any idea on what your current PR is?

TJ

[DerekH]

Horsepowerfreak wrote

I should have a lot of links pointing to this site

If this is the site you published the URL to on another post (you really shouldn't do that - the moderators will remove the URL and your gonads if they catch you!), then you need to do the following...

In Google, type link:[your url] - Google will list a selection of sites that link to you - it used to be all pages about PR4, but it just seems to be a selection lately!

In your case, no-one seems to link to you.
That's your problem - Google won't come by if there's no route to your site.
DerekH

[lawman]

>>Can I post the site name here or is that not allowed? I'd like someone to just take a peek and see if there's anything obvious.

Sorry Horsepowerfreak, not allowed.

lawman

[Teeroy]

I have the same problem...I used to be listed on page 2, and I do have a lot of links to my site, but now when I do the link:www.url.com, I get 9 returns....if I just put a search in for my url, I get hundreds of pages...and I'm not listed under my keywords anymore. I made no changes to my site...it just happened a few months ago, and has never rebounded...

[PatrickDeese]

Well I just did a site search for a site which I assume is yours (site:yourdomain.com) and Google shows over 8000 pages indexed.

So that means that your site is indeed being indexed, but not ranking.

That is a totally different issue. You need to look the content that is being indexed and look for ways to make it more "appetizing" to Google, vis a vis content, and I might also add that dynamic URLs have a lot of indexing issues.

[HorsepowerFreak]

Did you look at the plural name of the site, e.g. www.urls.com or the singular www.url.com to get the 8,000 pages?

Just curious where you are coming up with the 8,000? When I type link:www.url.com, I only get 19 on the plural name and 0 on the singular name.

If I just type in the plural name of my business I get 18,300 referrences many with links to my web-site. When I search for the singular version, I get 1200 also many with links.

I am using the W3C tool to fix some of the content issues right now.

[renee]

I see 958 pages all supplemental for site:yourdomain.com. Looks like you got the kiss of death.

[HorsepowerFreak]

What exactly does that mean? I could certainly put all of that content on another site of mine like url.net.

Chris.

[HorsepowerFreak]

I reworked all 5,000 pages to be W3C compliant. I also noticed one other thing that may have hurt the crawl. I had some of my main lettering in white. The table had a class on it that made the background Orange. Do you think the web spiders are smart enough to look at the class tag in the table to determine if the background color is different from the font and know that I'm not trying to hide anything with the white font?

Thanks.
Chris.

[steveb]

First, eliminate the duplicate site. Choose one URL, redirect the other domain to it.

Then clean up your internal linking mess. Your Home link goes to www.domain.com/frontpage.asp rather than www.domain.com

Then redirect domain.com to www.domain.com (or the other way around if you want)

Then ditch the frames.

Then make the navigation links on the left have less than a zillion parameters.

Every one of these problems posted here are the result of inconsistent/confusing webmastering. Your problem is easy to solve with stuff under your control.

[LouMinatti]

It's funny you should mention that, Teeroy. I just checked the same thing. When I do an Advanced Search on our domain name, all 250+ of our pages are there. The pages are all cached. When I go to the main Google page to search on that domain, I only get the URL as a result. I don't get any of the text associated with the website, nor is there a link to the cached page. Our PR is 6, we ranked in the top 5 up until last Friday. We ranked there for years. Now we're gone.

[Vertical Marketeer]

sent you a sticky.. is your site automotive parts related, if so I can help you out.

Phil-

[HorsepowerFreak]

Steve,

I have a non frame site that is www.url.com (without the s). That links everyone directly into the site that has frames. That is the site I am trying to perfect for the spiders. I agree frames suck for spiders, but it makes navigation for the end user quite easy and doesn't require repainting the whole screen everytime someone makes a selection.

On the frame site I will probably at some point ditch all the stupid little gifs and replace them with DHTML. I just haven't done that yet.

I really want to get the google spider to crawl my non-frame site. It is doing it one page at a time based on an old selection it made quite some time ago. I could copy the whole site to another domain and host it elsewhere to see if google will crawl it with some added enthusiasm. like www.url.net. What do you think?

Chris.

[steveb]

I'd do what I suggest above. What you don't need is yet another site. You have two sites that are very close to duplicates (without the frame component). Delete one completely and redirect it to the other. Clean up the bad navigation on the domain you keep. I'm not a tech guy so I don't know the best way to move away from the frames, but it is clear you have created a lot of problems for yourself, and you should proceed in an organzied way to correct them.

[skippy]

Listen to Steve. Google is not killing you. You are doing that all by yourself with duplicate content.

[HorsepowerFreak]

I appreciate the advice, however, there is no duplicate content. Google cannot and does not know about my main site because it can't crawl it. Even if it could the content is different.

Google makes a very feeble attempt to crawl the site I'm concerned about (www.url.com) and it does not know about any duplicate content. Yahoo has crawled it and sends me over 1,500 visitors / day.

An easily spidered site is not going to be robust for the end user. That's why I have separated them. The area that I know hurts is reverse referrals and for sure there are more on my main "frame" style site.

Chris.

[buckworks]

An easily spidered site is not going to be robust for the end user.

Double-check that assumption ...

[steveb]

"Google cannot and does not know about my main site because it can't crawl it."

Huh? Both sites are indexed. True, it is primarily supplemental results, but that is a sign of the problem.

Even if you don't deal with the duplicate sites, you still have the internal linking mess. On the singular site your testemonials page is well indexed, but it doesn't even link back to your own domain.

But WW really isn't for site reviews. The bottom line here is you are underperforming in Google because you are not helping it crawl you. Rebuild the site with consistent linking, and either make two completely different sites that are comprehensive unto themselves (little crosslinking needed) or ditch one and focus on the other.

One last thing, it looks like lots (all?) the pages on the singular site dead end with ho way back to the main page.

[Teeroy]

In looking at my logs, I've noticed that the googlebot shows up in my visits almost daily, but when I check visiting spiders it's saying googlebot hasn't visited in months. Any thoughts or suggestions?

[jnmconsulting]

It depends on the filters applied to track the google bot, it has changed over the last couple of months, so if the filter on the log reporter has not changed then it will not be able to identify google bot.

[Teeroy]

I'm actually not using any filters at all. All the other spiders are showing increases in their visits, but google hasn't been there in over 6 weeks. and as i said before, the link:www.url.com search shows only a handful of pages linking to me...which is totally crazy. I get 100 X as many results if I just type in my url, all of them linking to me...seems messed up.

[manzan]

I have a similar situation - I have a main page linking to 2 similar pages - one with a frame and anoher without a frame. The one with a frame is more user-friendly so I have a javascript dialog box directing people to the frame page (from the nonframe page). The non frame page is spidered. The frame main page is spidered but it has a no-follow in the meta tage so the seach engines cannot really get into the individual frames. I am concerned after reading the posts that google may consider these two pages as duplicate. ps advice!