5 Months and STILL not Google Indexed (sorta)

[lousterg]

Hello all,

 

First off, I'd like to quickly say THANKS to the community - I've learned a ton from everybody!

 

Unfortunately, as is human nature, I'm posting to ask for assistance. Here's the backgound:

 

- as Thanksgiving approached last year (late Nov for you non-Americans :)) , I madly scrambled to get my site up and running. I installed a bunch of contributions and tested fully (or so I thought) before deploying. Well...in the rush to leave on vacaton, I made a fatal blunder - I accidentally loaded my production database with an early version that had Linda's header tags contribution installed but almost all the database header tag FIELDS WERE EMPTY.

 

- Error #2 - additionally, I installed Linda's 'Down for Maintenance' contribution. Wise person that I am, I thought it would be great to use this to flag people browsing the site that we were away on vacation.

 

Well, it would figure that Googlebot came by while I was away the 5 days. The two snafus created a major problem. I now have and have had since early Dec, only 28 pages indexed by Google. Even though I have nearly 500 products available. I believe this is due to the fact that almost all page HTML TITLE'S were blank on the first pass through. I know Googlebot hasn't reindexed as the mention of us being away is stilll in the Google search preview/summary blurb and I changed it immediately upon my return. The Googlebot's been by every month but nothing changes.

 

So, can anyone suggest how in the world I can get the Googlebot to 'forgive' me and reindex (actually index!)??!!!

[OrbitBob]

Hi Louie, you might want to try the (free) services of http://crawler-alert.com/

Also, you don't actually mention if you resubmitted or not. In this I would definately resubmit to our dear friend Google!

As for Google 'actually' fully indexing, can't really help you there. I'm no expert on this issue.

[lousterg]

Hi Robbie,

 

Thanks very much for the reply.

 

I actually have submitted 3 times to google (every other month). And I submitted to DMOZ (open database project) - neither of these two things has amounted to anything at all.

 

I've actually installed AWSTAT's - which has great graphical views of all visitor statistics. Again, Googlebot keeps coming by (at least once a month) and is just 'looking through the window' and then leaving without bothering to even knock!

 

I'm really, really at a loss as to what to do next.

 

Louie

[rseigel]

Google doesn't care about your META tags. It uses text from the actual page for rankings. Are you sure you don't have a robots.txt file screwing things up?

[lousterg]

Hi Ron,

 

Well...I did a ton of research on the boards here and at Webmasterworld and I agree that most people think that the META tags have no bearing in ranking. This may be true. But:

 

- the Meta Tags were definitely used to create the text summary/preview and the Google summary (for the 28) has not been updated even though the <TITLE> tags have been different since about Dec 2nd.

 

Re: robots.txt

 

OK. I'm very embarrassed! I've checked that @$@ robots.txt file multiple times. But since you mentioned it, I decided to do it again. Well....among others, I have the following entry:

 

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

 

I originally copied a long list of suggested php page disallows (for SEO) and somehow picked up this above Disallow (not sure why it was ever in the list to begin with as the list was supposed to just block the php pages to avoid - such as create_account.php, etc.). I've never noticed the line. I've removed the line and I'm betting I'll be ok now.

 

Boy...it's funny how one can look at things a dozen times and STILL not see the problem. And then the guy in the next cube walks over, points at the screen, and goes 'what about that?'.....<sigh> Glad to know I feel just as much a schmuck when it's in cyberspace.

 

Thanks for the help, Robbie.

 

Oh...I'll post a follow up to let everyone know the results when Googlebot returns..."The Return of Googlebot"?? "The Googlebot Walks Among Us"??

...cue the music :)

[Jack_mcs]

So, can anyone suggest how in the world I can get the Googlebot to 'forgive' me and reindex (actually index!)??!!!

Sorry to say that there is little you can do. It can take months for google to adjust your listings. Don't keep submitting your site, they say not to do that. And don't use monitoring programs to check your status as they mention not to do that also. One of the best things you can do is increase your ranking. This is determined by the number of links to your site. On google's help page for web masters, they mention you can ask them to remove a listing that no longer applies. However, if they did this, it may mean that you would not be listed at all until they updated their database again. From my understanding, google has ten databases that they rotate. Your listing may be correct in one of the databases and not the others. As they rotate through, they keep checking and comparing your site. Eventually they will get all db's in sync and your listing will be correct.

 

So, all you can do is keep working on your site's ranking. Submit it to Froogle if you haven't as well as to Yahoo, Alta Vista and whichever other SE's that have free listings.

 

Oh, as for DMoz, do not submit your site again. They do not like that at all. You can ask on The DMoz Forum about the status of your site. Sometimes a site is deleted for some reason and the site owner is not notified. But most times it is just sitting, waiting review. It can take years for a site to get listed on DMoz depending upon the category and available editors.

 

HTH,

Jack

[♥Vger]

You do have some listings with Google, and a way to increase that (although not officially) is to install a Google Search Box somewhere on your site. That guarantees that Google pops by to reindex your site!

 

Also, depending upon how much money you've got to spend, you may want to invest in a small Google Ad Words campaign? Amazing what money can do.

 

Don't forget - the best way to get noticed by Google is to have as many links as possible to your website ON OTHER WEBSITES. So, if you have other websites, pop a few links on each of them to the new site and this should increase your Google ranking. Soon you'll be complaining about the amount of bandwidth Googlebot is eating up, and posting to ask if there's any way you can stop them indexing you!

 

Vger

[rseigel]

Don't keep submitting your site, they say not to do that.

Who says not to do that? According to Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/1.html#A2

 

You can submit your site as often as you like, but multiple submissions will not improve the likelihood of your site being added or accelerate the process. We do not penalize sites for 'over-submitting'. If you choose to submit your site, only the top-level domain is necessary, as the spiders will follow your internal links to all the rest of the pages.

 

Please get your facts straight before giving advice. It doesn't help anyone involved when you spread incorrect information.

[Jack_mcs]

Please get your facts straight before giving advice. It doesn't help anyone involved when you spread incorrect information.

LOL. You are correct on that one point and I stand corrected.

 

Jack