Google Webmaster Tools error

[Linknz]

Hi I thought I would have a look or you, I run and own a New Zealand based search engine, so I just sent our web spider over to your website to see what results it cam back with.
It failed to find any links from your index page and even when I aimed the spider a page inside your website it failed to find the file.
It looks to me from here that your website is written using java and webspiders can't follow or locate any links that java gives to any pages.
You also appear to have some flash graphics running and webspiders can't index a flash images.
If I were you I would suggest that you also have content with html links, so when a web spider comes calling it will be able to read and then follow them, so what you need is a way of showing any crawlers where your files are and java doesn't mean tiddly squat to a webspider.

[chris_g]

Hi Carlos

The comments are all good but you also have some serious server issues. Search engine bots use GET HTTP 1.0 or 1.1 to retrieve pages for indexing. When I use a robots simulator I get 2 errors depending on which Bot we simulate.

Googlebot- sees this error which is consistant with what the Google Webmaster Tools is telling you "Invalid URL or server does not respond, HTTP return code: 302"

When I look at your site using GET HTTP 1.0 the header response is "HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request" When I tried GET HTTP 1.1 the header response is "HTTP/1.1 302 Found"

I would say you have a hosting problem that needs to be resolved. Your host has the server incorrectly set up to be read by a search engine.

The information from Google is good you just need to figure out how to fix the mess or move your website to more qualified web host to get the search engiens to read your website.

[carlosleal]

Hi Carlos

The comments are all good but you also have some serious server issues. Search engine bots use GET HTTP 1.0 or 1.1 to retrieve pages for indexing. When I use a robots simulator I get 2 errors depending on which Bot we simulate.

Googlebot- sees this error which is consistant with what the Google Webmaster Tools is telling you "Invalid URL or server does not respond, HTTP return code: 302"

When I look at your site using GET HTTP 1.0 the header response is "HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request" When I tried GET HTTP 1.1 the header response is "HTTP/1.1 302 Found"

I would say you have a hosting problem that needs to be resolved. Your host has the server incorrectly set up to be read by a search engine.

The information from Google is good you just need to figure out how to fix the mess or move your website to more qualified web host to get the search engiens to read your website.

Thanks for your help, by the way anyone knows how to fix this error?

[carlos_p]

OT:

(...) I've noticed that sites designed in Portugal or Italy, majority are quite a load of rubbish (...)

I take offense on the above statement. Please keep any subjective and offensive remarks based on unverified or non existent data to yourself.
And I must add I miss the point of replicating here the whole source of the page.

-----

Back on topic:

1-Major problem:
Using form INPUT elements for navigation - stick to the rules: use HYPERLINKS for your links. It's called HTML for some reason. If you try to reinvent the wheel, at least don't invent a square one.

2-Major bummer:
DNS quirks already mentioned.

3-Major annoyance:
Looks like in MSland, every page is named "Default"... You might as well name all your images "untitled1.jpg", "untitled2.jpg",... You should try to make every piece of information meaningful.

4-Minor annoyances:
White space before doctype declaration + no explicit document encoding.

I also suggest you'd put all the js in external files instead of embedding it.

[carlosleal]

I understand everything you said and i'm contantly improving the website, but the major problem that I have right know is, like "chris_g" said, the bot's can't find the site... I already spend hours googling this issue....

[texxs]

"I note in the vicaima site you have a massive form encompassing virtually all of the <body> of the page. Surely Google will have a problem indexing anything on the page, because it's all in a form. Compare to the siteuptime site and the form you use there does leave some indexable stuff in the <body> of the page, i.e. outside the form."

This is a requirement of the ASP.NET platform. The form tag should be inside the body tags and encompass everything in the body tag. MS is sooo stupid....

"You also have some validation errors . . ." ya all good sites do.

And everyone is right about your site sir. There is not one word of readable content (for a SE or vision-impaired human) on your index page. Google thinks it's a blank page. What do you think google will do w/ a blank page?

Flash intros and sites are nice but Google killed them off years ago by being very republican (out of touch w/ reality), about it. They've said, in essence, "Don't use a flash intro or we will penalize you in our ranking, perhaps even dropping you altogether, unless, of course, you happen to be 'connected' in which case it won't hurt you at all."

So in short <b>you wanna do better in the SE's? Then loose the flash Intro.</b> Try a flash header instead.

[kmredo]

My understanding of Google's BOT is that it can't read Javascript or what is inside Flash... Your whole index page is half of each. I have this problem on my own site (all the navigation is in Javascript) and the Google bot gets here, reads the page title only and then leaves when it gets to the Javascript. There is nothing for Google to spider because it can't read your Flash links - so it just leaves. I teach this stuff, but am no way an SEO expert, but I still tell my students don't ever use Flash as your site, but only use it sparingly to enhance your site, but not as the site itself. I tell them to use CSS menus and navigations too, because the Bots can read and follow them without a hitch. Good luck!

[wige]

First, I notice your error message page (requests for / get 302 redirected to http://www.vicaima.com/ErrorPage.asp...=/Default.aspx) triggers a server error. This needs to be corrected.

Second, the virtual hosting is improperly configured on this server. You will not be able to be spidered because your site improperly responds to requests. This is something you have to take up with your web host.

Conversation Transcript:
GET http://www.vicaima.com/ HTTP/1.0
User-Agent: Opera/9.21 (Windows NT 6.0; U; en) Paros/3.2.13
Host: www.vicaima.com
Content-length: 0

HTTP/1.1 302 Found
Connection: close
Date: Wed, 05 Sep 2007 14:35:03 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
X-AspNet-Version: 2.0.50727
Location: /ErrorPage.aspx?aspxerrorpath=/Default.aspx
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 160

Also, this error page returns a code of 200, when it doesn't crash, which could cause spidering and indexing issues as well.

[carlosleal]

I think i'm almost getting the solution... it's a asp.net 2.0 bug.... I think so... or no

[incrediblehelp]

So Carlos you have access to the logs and you have verified that you are getting no spidering activity?