Hi guys, I know that google can take months to get your site listed on their search engine but I was wishing to get second opinions of more in the know ppl.

 

My site has been live for 6-7 weeks now, my site is verified etc. By searching Miga Designs I am there with Yahoo but not Google. I wondered if anyone could take a look at my page source and see if I have done anything wrong for the purposes of Google itself....

 

I have created a sitemap.xml and on the I-Google webmaster tab, Google has visited pages etc.

 

Up until a couple of days ago in my meta tags I had "Index, follow, no archive", the no archive part I removed, will this have a positive future effect or make no difference?

 

Cheers Guys,

 

Michael

Hi guys, I know that google can take months to get your site listed on their search engine but I was wishing to get second opinions of more in the know ppl.

 

My site has been live for 6-7 weeks now, my site is verified etc. By searching Miga Designs I am there with Yahoo but not Google. I wondered if anyone could take a look at my page source and see if I have done anything wrong for the purposes of Google itself....

 

I have created a sitemap.xml and on the I-Google webmaster tab, Google has visited pages etc.

 

Up until a couple of days ago in my meta tags I had "Index, follow, no archive", the no archive part I removed, will this have a positive future effect or make no difference?

 

Cheers Guys,

 

Michael

 

You still have an error in your conditional comments that is stopping your page from validating, i'm not sure if this is enough to stop google indexing your site, but the fewer errors the better.

 

<!-- This is the start of the style information -->
<!--[if IE]>
  	<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles/altymigaIE.css" />
	<![endif]-->

	<![if !IE]>

  	 <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles/altymiga.css" />
  	 <![endif]>
<!-- This is the end of the style information -->

 

replace the above with this

 

<!--[if IE]>
  	<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles/altymigaIE.css" />
	<![endif]-->

 

Cheers

 

Pat

<![if !IE]> is used by some to tell IE not to read it so that IE will ignore it, but it isn't a valid way of doing a conditional statements. It is best just to have this as a normal CSS link and then have the conditional statements under it.

Hi Michael

 

General points to making sure a website is indexed, which should normally only take days, not months:

 

Meaningful links from other well indexed websites.

Content that is worth indexing.

The site needs to be easily accessible.

Submitting a .xml sitemap is worth the trouble.

Navigation needs to be functional.

 

Don't know if you would like to give any of those a little consideration.

 

There are a couple of pages in Google relating to your site, although not the ones you would want:

 

Your Listing

 

You need to give some thought to the server set up. On that subject, your site is not accessible much of the time, a problem for bots, might be worth talking to 123. Can't check your sitemap, although on the meta tag point, many of yours can simply be removed and one or two should be.

 

Sorry to be a bit lacking in detail but can not get back to your website,

You still have an error in your conditional comments that is stopping your page from validating, i'm not sure if this is enough to stop google indexing your site, but the fewer errors the better.

 

<!-- This is the start of the style information -->
<!--[if IE]>
  	<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles/altymigaIE.css" />
	<![endif]-->

	<![if !IE]>

  	 <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles/altymiga.css" />
  	 <![endif]>
<!-- This is the end of the style information -->

 

replace the above with this

 

<!--[if IE]>
  	<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles/altymigaIE.css" />
	<![endif]-->

 

Cheers

 

Pat

 

Alright Pat, isnt that just the same thing as is in my head section? Or do I not need to do one for IE and one for FF?

 

<![if !IE]> is used by some to tell IE not to read it so that IE will ignore it, but it isn't a valid way of doing a conditional statements. It is best just to have this as a normal CSS link and then have the conditional statements under it.

 

I don't get this!

 

Hi Michael

 

General points to making sure a website is indexed, which should normally only take days, not months:

 

Meaningful links from other well indexed websites.

Content that is worth indexing.

The site needs to be easily accessible.

Submitting a .xml sitemap is worth the trouble.

Navigation needs to be functional.

 

Don't know if you would like to give any of those a little consideration.

 

There are a couple of pages in Google relating to your site, although not the ones you would want:

 

Your Listing

 

You need to give some thought to the server set up. On that subject, your site is not accessible much of the time, a problem for bots, might be worth talking to 123. Can't check your sitemap, although on the meta tag point, many of yours can simply be removed and one or two should be.

 

Sorry to be a bit lacking in detail but can not get back to your website,

 

What tags should be? How do you actually know which ones you should and shouldn't use?

 

Why can't you get back on to the site, it works fine for me! Strange.

 

I have changed the CSS statement now, I think thats right. I saw that when viewing my sourcethat what surrounded the FF CSS statement was in red! Bit dozy like.

http://www.miga-designs.co.uk/sitemap.xml Here you go Pegasus this is my sitemap, just checked in Google webmaster and there is a warning message for my sitemap.

 

This is what google webmaster says about my site:

 

URLs not followed

When we tested a sample of the URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs were not accessible to Googlebot because they contained too many redirects. Please change the URLs in your Sitemap that redirect and replace them with the destination URL (the redirect target). All valid URLs will still be submitted.

 

HTTP Error:

URL:

Found: 302 (Moved temporarily) Help Help

 

http://www.miga-designs.co.uk/404.html

Jul 21, 2008

I can't even access your site. All my sites seem to get picked up within a few days without me doing anything, they will have 1 or 2 low level links linking to it but normally go up pretty high, which I assume is down to good markup.

I found that the other day I couldn't even access your site. It said, "this page is not accessible". But then the next day, I could.

http://www.miga-designs.co.uk/sitemap.xml Here you go Pegasus this is my sitemap, just checked in Google webmaster and there is a warning message for my sitemap.

 

This is what google webmaster says about my site:

 

URLs not followed

When we tested a sample of the URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs were not accessible to Googlebot because they contained too many redirects. Please change the URLs in your Sitemap that redirect and replace them with the destination URL (the redirect target). All valid URLs will still be submitted.

 

HTTP Error:

URL:

Found: 302 (Moved temporarily) Help Help

 

http://www.miga-designs.co.uk/404.html

Jul 21, 2008

 

Hi Michael

 

Regarding the server downtime, I believe others have now posted the same. Apart from to visitors, this is a problem for indexing, talk to your hosts.

 

Thanks for the sitemap link, didn't notice anything structurally wrong but a couple of points to fix. You have the same page listed twice - http://www.miga-designs.co.uk/ and http://www.miga-designs.co.uk/index.html are the same page. You need to choose one, preferably just / and put a 301 permanent redirect in place from the other, then remove the unwanted page from the site map. Also, you have the change frequency for every page set at 1 day and the priority for most pages set at 1.0, which is the highest possible. Alter the change frequency to be more realistic and the priorities to average out at about 0.5, which is the default. i.e. Home Page 1.0 next important page 0.8, a couple at 0.3, one at 0.4, whatever, you see the idea.

 

Re the meta tags - One concern was <meta http-equiv="expires" content="0" /> This is not tag I think you need and although the 0 setting was common at one time, this has been known to be misinterpreted and is now not generally used. Most of the tags below are in a similar vein, either restating the default, deliberately ignored by bots, or pointless, yet every one is an opportunity to make an error, which we all do.

 

I will have a look at the 302 and general redirect situation and get back to you.

Hi Michael

 

What I imagine is meant to be a custom 404 page is just redirecting to itself in a never ending loop. You need to amend the URL inside and in any event, no real need to have this in a sitemap, or even indexed.

 

I imagine this was the reported fault, although once again, problems accessing your site so can not be sure. I did use a bot simulator to check the other URLs and they are probably OK. No idea if you are using a .htaccess file on the site but if there is one, have a look to see if there are any redirects in there that you may not want. The 404 page may have been the only problem though.

 

Regarding the overall site, one suggestion would be to strip out all your files, make sure there is nothing in the public folder you do not want, then put a clean copy up. For a relatively small site, this will only take a few minutes and is quicker than looking for rogue files, URL typos etc. Then keep testing your site at different times of day and if the problems persist, your server may need attention.

 

Once you have clean files up, worth making and submitting a new sitemap as well, then Google will give you a fairly quick idea if they are still having problems.