.Site Not Indexed in Google In Two Years

Curious George · #1 (**permalink**) 08-17-2006, 05:49 PM

Hi Friends,

I created an e-commerce site for a friend about 2 years ago. The site for reasons beyond my comprehension has NOT gotten indexed by almighty Google. The site stats shows that the last time Googlebot crawled the site was August 17th (earlier today). The domain is in good standing - not banned or blacklisted. I have not experience this before with any site I have worked on.

I hope someone here can help resolve this Google mystery. I look forward to useful insight on what can be done to get out of this sticky mess.
Thanks!

Curious George

Webnauts · #2 (**permalink**) 08-17-2006, 07:58 PM

Can you tell us the URL so we can have a closer look?

Curious George · #3 (**permalink**) 08-17-2006, 08:08 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Webnauts

Can you tell us the URL so we can have a closer look?

It is neswarehouse.com.

Thanks!

George

Webnauts · #4 (**permalink**) 08-17-2006, 08:22 PM

George I do not know the structure of your site. Could it be that you are excluding things you shoulnd't in your robots.txt?

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /download/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /template/
Disallow: /templates/

Webnauts · #5 (**permalink**) 08-17-2006, 08:27 PM

I also see that you are spamming with your keywords meta tags, as they are not relevant to the content.

I would suggest you anyway to check your pages and fix all that.

Here are two useful tools for that:

1. http://www.submitexpress.com/analyzer/
2. http://www.webnauts.net/check.html#int-seo

Curious George · #6 (**permalink**) 08-17-2006, 08:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Webnauts

George I do not know the structure of your site. Could it be that you are excluding things you shoulnd't in your robots.txt?

User-Agent: *
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /download/
Disallow: /includes/
Disallow: /template/
Disallow: /templates/

The robots.txt file was just add this afternoon.

Thanks!

George

google junky · #7 (**permalink**) 08-17-2006, 09:15 PM

W3C validation can't even get past line 1 which is your DOCTYPE.
The DOCTYPE is not writtem correctly.

Code:

Currently as 
<!doctype html public "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

Should be
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

If you want to do it the way it is really supposed to be then use this
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/loose.dtd">

When selecting to view the cource using W3C it shows there is none.
Try adding the correct DOCTYPE and then we will see where to go from there.

This HTML tag is a new one on me.

Code:

<html dir="ltr" lang="en">

What is the purpose of this rather than just using <html>?

This line is not written as HTML.
<META name="verify-v1" content="VSliQfXoKlRcH+wImt5FfmqKq1WhVlQpv9Ci3mWX8 70=" />
The forward slash doesn't belong.
I'm not quite sure what this line is for either.

Webnauts · #8 (**permalink**) 08-17-2006, 09:36 PM

Google Junky,

this <html dir="LTR" lang="en"> is correct.

The dir="LTR means "left to right" which is redudant though.

The lang="en" is required. That is for sure correct.

But!!! I found on the page 68 markup errors and 23 warnings. And for sure the page is not an HTML document. I do not want to start a discussion here if Search Engines care about that or not (I guess you know why), but I would seriously suggest that the pages must be fixed.

Here are some tools to start with: http://www.webnauts.net/check.html

Curious George · #9 (**permalink**) 08-17-2006, 11:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by google junky

This line is not written as HTML.
<META name="verify-v1" content="VSliQfXoKlRcH+wImt5FfmqKq1WhVlQpv9Ci3mWX8 70=" />
The forward slash doesn't belong.
I'm not quite sure what this line is for either.

That is validation tag generated by Google. I only inserted it into the file.

Thanks!

George

google junky · #10 (**permalink**) 08-17-2006, 11:35 PM

Let me know when you have fixed those errros and I'll check back.
So far I still see the DOCTYPE wrong

Webnauts · #11 (**permalink**) 08-18-2006, 08:00 AM

I will check again too when errors are gone.

Curious George · #12 (**permalink**) 10-25-2006, 11:02 AM

The issue has been resolved.

It was caused by the site being cloaked from Google and MSN bots. I have enabled the sessions by search engine bots. I guess if a bot couldn't start a session, it won't have anything to index.

I used cloaking detector found at http://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/...-detector.html to test the change. Before the change, "the site in Google view" section of the page was blank. It meant that the site was cloaked from Google and probably MSN Live.

The site now appears in Google's SERP. I am still waiting for MSN Live to update their index as well.

I appreciate all your assistance.

Thanks!

Curious George