What should I do to make sure Google comes around?

[Vulcan315]

I don't know the correct way to do this, but here's what I've done, and why:

I started my company website back in '98. Until that time, I had only had a personal site and ham radio club website...so I sorta learned this stuff on the fly. Needless to say, I've made a lot of mistakes along the way. Back when I started my company site, I built it in a sub-dir of an existing site I had. So, my site was like <snip>. As time moved along, I'd write pages like index1.html, entry.html, etc...while I was experimenting with different looks and such.

I began to notice that Google had found all the other entry pages, and I needed the traffic, so I let it be. I found myself with about 8 entry pages...whew! I have about 11 people here who are dependant on a paycheck, and with about 70% of our business coming from the web, I was reluctant to mess with it.

I've been reading like crazy over the last few months, trying to learn how to better design my page. I learned that hidden text was bad, among other stuff that was wrong on my site. I've made many many changes, and I hope the site is now much better for Google to work with. Along with cleaning things up, I've placed 301 redirects in my .htaccess file to get away from all those duplicate entry pages that were cluttering things up.

Now that I've been reading all about the engine changes, do's and don'ts, etc, I'm worried that my website may have been penalized for my ignorance and lack of good deasign.

Should I now resubmit <snip> (by itself, since I read the googlebot finds all other pages)?

Is there anyone at Google I should email (I'm sure they get zillions, though), in case they think I was trying to spam them with my stupidity?

Thanks,
Dave

[edited by: Brett_Tabke at 12:54 pm (utc) on Oct. 18, 2004]

[edited by: engine at 4:28 pm (utc) on Oct. 21, 2004]
[edit reason] please, no specifics. [/edit]

[Vulcan315]

A little more on this... my page ranks returned this past weekend, only to now have completely disappeared from the Google index. I'm at a loss as to what has happened, but I can't even find my own URL when I search for it.

I do have more than one domain (bought to protect my business domain name) pointed at the same IP address, and now I'm wondering if that caused problems.

I'm lost...does anyone have any input that might help?

Dave

[Robert Charlton]

I do have more than one domain (bought to protect my business domain name) pointed at the same IP address, and now I'm wondering if that caused problems.

Vulcan315 - Assuming this is the site in your profile... yes, that is your problem. I see that you have identical content on these domains... yourdomain.com and yourdomain.net, and that will cause Google to drop one of them, generally the one with the fewer inbound links. Right now they both show Toobar PageRank, and the .net is lower.

You need to set them up so only the main domain shows in the address window no matter which one is typed in. You probably should keep the .com domain. Do this by redirecting the yourdomain.net to yourdomain.com, using a 301 permanent redirect in the .htaccess file on your server (assuming you're on an Apache server).

This is going to require that you have the ability to do this on your server and that you know what you're doing. You could just drop one of the domains, but you would lose the inbound link credit going to yourdomain.net.

Definitely do not use a meta refresh redirect or other on-page redirect to do this.

You either have a lot of reading to do, or you need to hire someone who knows what he's doing. Search WebmasterWorld on Google for the following search terms...

- permanent redirect, 301 redirect, mirror sites, etc

Good luck.

[Vulcan315]

Thanks for the feedback...that's what I was wondering about. I think I'll have to set the "A" records in the other domains to a different server location, where I can place a .htaccess to do a 301... Currently, all of the domains are pointed straight at the same IP address. I don't know of a way to write a .htaccess string that will redirect an incoming from domain.net/index.html to domain.com/index.html, as they are one in the same (same file, same server).

Here's what the DNS is doing:

domain.net -> ip_addy_123 (my server's ip)
domain.com -> ip_addy_123 (my server's ip)
domain.org -> ip_addy_123 (my server's ip)
another_domain.com -> ip_addy_123 (my server's ip)

Since the first location in the .htaccess string on the server only looks for the file name/location, and all of the above domains are pointing at index.html , does anyone know how this could be done? I've experimented with something like:

redirect 301 [domain.net...] [domain.com...]

But that doesn't work because I can't use "http://www.domain.net" in front of the file name in the first location of the .htaccess...

Google seems to have completely kicked [domain.com...] completely out of the index , and as my luck would have it, it's the one I wanted in.

Dave

[jdMorgan]

This is not a difficult thing to fix.

With your existing setup, .net and .com pointed to the same IP, insert the following code into the top-level .htaccess file:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.yourdomain\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This checks the Hostname in the incoming HTTP request, and if it is present and is *not* www.yourdomain.com, invokes a 301-Moved Permanently redirect to the requested page on the correct www.yourdomain.com domain.

All variations will be redirected to www.yourdomain.com, including www.yourdomain.net, yourdomain.net, and yourdomain.com.

You may not need the Options +FollowSymLinks if this option has already been configured on your server. You won't need RewriteEngine on either, if this directive is already present in your .htaccess file.

Jim