search engine question

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search engine question

search engine

meanweaver

8:20 am on Oct 10, 2004 (gmt 0)

Not sure if this is the correct place for this post but here goes, i just typed in my site name into google to see if it would come up and it did, however that was all, the bit underneath that normally carries a small descripting was missing, so there was a page with other sites and there descriptions no problem get to mine and it was just my name, in the bit that would normally have a description was a link titled Similar pages, I have meta tags on all my pages with content and description, can anyone shed any light on this.

Regards

hannamyluv

12:10 pm on Oct 10, 2004 (gmt 0)

Google uses snippets from a webpage as the description instead of the description meta tag. So, if you type in "widgets" the description shown in google will be a few words before through the few words after the word searched for.

Your description may not be showing up due to two reasons. The first is that a search engine reads the code much like a person in that it is very difficult sometimes for them to determine what is code and what is supposeto be text. The more code (JavaScript, HTML, etc.) you have in the way, the harder itis for a SE to find your text. Too much in the way, and the SE will not be able to decipher what's code and what's text.

The other is that there is no real text on your page. Flash sites and all image sites can be susptible to this in that their "text" is actually images.

Now, if the listing displayed was just a URL and not your page title, that means that thepage has been recognized as existing by Google, but just has not been properly indexed yet.

meanweaver

8:47 pm on Oct 10, 2004 (gmt 0)

Thanks for the reply, The site is small and simple and has no javascript at all, the one thing i did notice is in the meta tags the first one i put in was the author, this had just my site name which was also the name that appeared in google, so i have taken this out as i dont think that really makes any differance nowdays, the last time i done this check was back in about March so things where fine then, i have changed hardly anything on the site, not to bothered as the site is mostly used by me just for experiments with scrpits and things, but was just scratching my head why all info is now missing on the google search, will wait and see if taking the author out as the 1st meta tag makes any differance.
Regards Ian

Larryhat

12:12 am on Oct 11, 2004 (gmt 0)

Hello meanweaver:

If you haven't done so already, try
validating your page(s) on W3C:

[validator.w3.org...]

One misplaced character can prevent Google
etc. from seeing your whole page.

Best - Larry

meanweaver

7:24 pm on Oct 11, 2004 (gmt 0)

I may well have found the problem, I had not declared the doc type before the opening html tag, so have now replaced it with this

<?php echo "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"iso-8859-1\"?".">";?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

This was the major thing is failed the vaidator on aswell as a few other smaller details, whill watch and wait to see if the spiders start to work.

Regards Ian

photon

8:27 pm on Oct 11, 2004 (gmt 0)

Just be aware that anything before the doctype will throw IE6 into quirks mode, in essence making the doctype declaration moot.

meanweaver

10:42 pm on Oct 13, 2004 (gmt 0)

I have now started the doc with
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
However a search on yahoo shows a description but not on google,

Thanks for all advice to date.
Regards