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Been following the forums quite a while trying to pick up ideas for better perfomance of different sites I'm handleing.
However during the past year I have a client site (not doing SEO for a living but rather general webpage optimization for quicker and better websites) which for quite some time (since 1996) hadn't been updatede until a year ago when we started moving it into a more modern look and feel.
Since then I have been monitoring the site and it seems that google is very fond of requesting the robots.txt file, then the frontpage and then nothing. It does this a couple of times a week but nothing more. The site isn't in the google index either.
This site is multilingual and the wierd part is that some of the old language pages (which hasn't been updated yet) remains in the google index and are also linking to the new version. The other language versions however is planned to be split out into different domains, but at the moment it's a little mixed waiting for the translated versions.
The site also has an okay amount of inbound links from different external sites however the problem is that the business is oldschool industrial production which means that almost every index catalog or company which would be linking to the site is so badly coded and isn't indexed in google or has a PR 0-3. It is unfortunately a product of to many companies being victims of bad webdesign decissions made by bob the handyman.
So somehow I seem stuck in a loop. I have tried dmoz but no respons during the last couple of months. One of the language versions is in dmoz but with a wrong url. I ask them to changed it which i got a nice reply on however nothing happend. This is a couple of weeks ago.
What I fear is that somehow site has been banned from google because of maybe former emploeyees try to use mass submission software or similar, however google hasn't responded to my mail sent to them a while ago.
Currently the site is using a flash frontpage with some "hidden" text as a fallback for CSS and flash incapable browsers. I might be wondering if this has cause google to dismiss crawling further than the front page?
Any comments and suggestion on this is very much appreciated since at the moment I don't have a clue how i might at least get googlebot to crawl the site a little deeper than the frontpage.
I haven't posted the link to the site because here I'm not quite sure this is good karma in here. However if it's okay I'll post the link if anyone of you would like to take a look and maybe find out what might be wrong.
In advance, thank you very much!
Updatede my profile to point towards the sit in question instead - hope that's okay karma. ;)
Hidden text?...... sounds dodgy! Are you using noscript tag? If not, use with links to all your other pages + some useful text for the spider.
Welcome to WebmasterWorld
I noticed one particular bit in your post
flash frontpage
I had a site that was only had resquests for the top page. Turned out the links were hidden from the likes of G. Removed them ---- next day a deep crawl and then soon after a deep crawl.
Cheers
Thanx :)
Yes I do have a normal text style nav at the site - the flash is only a short intro movie describing different products - the rest of the page is clean html - as close on XHTML 1.0 transitional as I currently can get using the available CMS system (needs some tweaking ;)
The cms system also generates friendly URL's without parameters so it shouldn't be that either.
regarding the "hidden" text then it's "only" af div with an id refference in an external css file declaring that block display:none;
This is for the browsers not supporting css which will get the text visible. However it should be wierd that it is that causing some problms because it's a rather new addition to fix the some problems we found recently. The "google will not index" - problem was experienced before that.
