Forum Moderators: open
[edited by: NFFC at 8:55 pm (utc) on Aug. 19, 2002]
[edit reason] URL snipped [/edit]
Welcome to WebmasterWorld!
If you submitted your site to Google only 3 weeks ago, you will likely have to wait another 5 weeks
before you should even worry about being banned. Until you've been indexed, and have then gone
through an entire one-month indexing cycle, there's no use worrying... Until you've gone through a
complete cycle, your site may well pop in and out of the index for no reason. Use the site search
here on WebmasterWorld, and you will see that this happens all the time for new sites.
Personally, I wouldn't worry about your 1x1 gif. I wouldn't use one myself, but it's not a major
thing. Although it might draw a penalty, that alone is unlikely to get you permanently banned.
The above is just my opinion, BTW, since I've never included - or been banned for - an invisible
link.
Jim
1x1 pixel linked transparent gif. Basically what I did was link this to my site map to ensure that the robot would find all of my pages and index them.
As far as that goes, what's wrong with a simple, visible, link? A site map can be useful for human visitors as well as for robots, after all.
But I agree with jdMorgan that it's too early to think you should have been listed already. The next monthly update shouldn't be far off though... and you might expect to be there after it's completed.
Thanks for the help. I figured that I probably was being a little quick to jump to conclusions. Thanks again.
Looks like www2 & www3 are showing results for my site! Thanks again for everyone's insite. This is a awesome site!
Nick
Glad to hear you're seeing some listings.
But, don't be surprised if your site continues to pop in and out of the SERPs for the next month -
Everything depends on the exact timing of when Googlebot crawled your pages. The results we are
seeing now are mostly from the end-of-July crawl, and if your pages (and the links pointing to them)
weren't fully crawled then, then they may not "stick" in this index. This is normal behavior, so
don't freak out if all or part of your site disappears after a few days. I know this isn't what you
want to hear, but it can take two months for new sites to stabilize in the Google index...
Even if your site does disappear, keep an eye out for Googlebot in your logs - you will likely see
it doing a full crawl of your site some time in the next four to seven days, and the results of this
crawl will be seen as a "permanent" listing next month.
I just don't want you and others with new sites to be jumping from the 100th-floor windows next
week, OK? :)
Best wishes,
Jim
