Hi All,
I am a novice at web design but have had to design a site for my
wife's business. I have been trying to get Google to index the site
for going on 7 months now with no success. I would love just to get
her site so that it might pop up with a keyword search for her name or
the project name.
Here's the skinny:
1. I created the site in iWeb 08 and am hosting with iMac.
2. I purchased a domain name and have the iMac site pointing to the
domain name.
The iMac site is: web.mac.com/hanssturm/Site
The domain it is pointing to is: starrynightgala.com
3. After many attempts, I worked with iMap tools (guimkie.com) and the
have the site successfully verified (with the iMac account so that
Google will see the pages with content) and have successfully uploaded
a sitemap.
4. I link to several sites and I know of at least 2 that are linking
back.
5. Google tells me that I have no warnings or errors and that the
first page is indexed through the iMac address, but nothing for the
domain.
I have read numerous posts on getting Google to crawl/index iWeb sites
and thought that perhaps I need to purchase hosting elsewhere or maybe
there was a problem with the way in which iWeb designed the site. (The
latest being trying the suggestion of going to bad-neighborhood.com
and discovering that there is a 302 file for both the iMac and domain
address.)
Hello Google Experts,
I was hoping to get some insight from one of the experts here as to
why my site isn't indexed. Again, any help would be greatly
appreciated. I just want to know if there is something I can do to get
www.starrynightgala.com to be indexed in such a way that at least the
keywords - starry night gala - appear somehow at some level in a
Google search. At the moment I get nothing. There are a few details in
the previous post. From reading various posts it seems that those with
expertise can look at a site quickly and make an assessment. Please.
I'm at a loss as to where to go from here.
Thank you for your time.
After doing a bit more research I have realized that there may be an
issue with iWeb converting the text of some pages into png images.
Since it seems that Google cannot crawl images, the suggestion I read
was that if it was not possible to select and copy text on a page that
it could not be crawled. I have gone through the pages and discovered
a little check box in iWeb preferences that allows you to see if there
has been a text to image conversion - very handy. I since have made
appropriate changes to the pages I am still uncertain if this will
suffice. (Could it be the background of some of the pages that are
causing interference?) I have also read that the default navi bar in
iWeb is a javascript (?) - made in such a way that it cannot be
crawled by Google. I have since added a new navi bar on the bottom of
several pages using hyperlinks with full URLs (http://etc.). I was
successful in submitting the sitemap and all 8 pages are there. There
are numerous links to others, especially from the Cast page, but also
from the Welcome and Music and Video pages.
Would someone please be kind enough to have a look at
starrynightgala.com and let me know what else I can do to get this
site so that it can be found in a key word search by Google?
> Hello Google Experts,
> I was hoping to get some insight from one of the experts here as to
> why my site isn't indexed. Again, any help would be greatly
> appreciated. I just want to know if there is something I can do to getwww.starrynightgala.comto be indexed in such a way that at least the
> keywords - starry night gala - appear somehow at some level in a
> Google search. At the moment I get nothing. There are a few details in
> the previous post. From reading various posts it seems that those with
> expertise can look at a site quickly and make an assessment. Please.
> I'm at a loss as to where to go from here.
> Thank you for your time.
It's one thing to use a Mac as your computer (enough problems with
that anyway, LOL, the world and the web aren't mac-ready) and quite a
dfferent thing to use mac hosting. That's such a PITA it's not worth
trying to bend yourself out of shape for it.
> After doing a bit more research I have realized that there may be an
> issue with iWeb converting the text of some pages into png images.
> Since it seems that Google cannot crawl images, the suggestion I read
> was that if it was not possible to select and copy text on a page that
> it could not be crawled. I have gone through the pages and discovered
> a little check box in iWeb preferences that allows you to see if there
> has been a text to image conversion - very handy. I since have made
> appropriate changes to the pages I am still uncertain if this will
> suffice. (Could it be the background of some of the pages that are
> causing interference?) I have also read that the default navi bar in
> iWeb is a javascript (?) - made in such a way that it cannot be
> crawled by Google. I have since added a new navi bar on the bottom of
> several pages using hyperlinks with full URLs (http://etc.). I was
> successful in submitting the sitemap and all 8 pages are there. There
> are numerous links to others, especially from the Cast page, but also
> from the Welcome and Music and Video pages.
> Would someone please be kind enough to have a look at
> starrynightgala.com and let me know what else I can do to get this
> site so that it can be found in a key word search by Google?
> Thank you.
> On Jun 11, 7:05 pm, dbass wrote:
> > Hello Google Experts,
> > I was hoping to get some insight from one of the experts here as to
> > why my site isn't indexed. Again, any help would be greatly
> > appreciated. I just want to know if there is something I can do to getwww.starrynightgala.comtobe indexed in such a way that at least the
> > keywords - starry night gala - appear somehow at some level in a
> > Google search. At the moment I get nothing. There are a few details in
> > the previous post. From reading various posts it seems that those with
> > expertise can look at a site quickly and make an assessment. Please.
> > I'm at a loss as to where to go from here.
> > Thank you for your time.- Hide quoted text -
As you mentioned, engine can have issues with JavaScript. Either way,
you need to help engines find your site. To help them, setup a Google
Webmasters Tools account and submit an xml sitemap. In addition, tell
other folks about your site and ask them to link to you. Google can
follow these links to your site.
With limited information, it seems like you could copy the code from
the .mac pages and assests but you'll need a professional who reads
and writes html. Either way by copying rendered code and recreating
the naming convention for files it would seem you could get hosting,
ftp the copied files and then KILL the .mac account. At that point if
all goes as planed you would have the same website at your URL but not
at .mac. As webado has suggested you must change hosts!
> As you mentioned, engine can have issues with JavaScript. Either way,
> you need to help engines find your site. To help them, setup a Google
> Webmasters Tools account and submit an xml sitemap. In addition, tell
> other folks about your site and ask them to link to you. Google can
> follow these links to your site.
> With limited information, it seems like you could copy the code from
> the .mac pages and assests but you'll need a professional who reads
> and writes html. Either way by copying rendered code and recreating
> the naming convention for files it would seem you could get hosting,
> ftp the copied files and then KILL the .mac account. At that point if
> all goes as planed you would have the same website at your URL but not
> at .mac. As webado has suggested you must change hosts!
I think you already found some of the most important issues (the
saving of text as an image is particularly troublesome with iWeb,
grrr!). If you want to continue with your current hosting solution for
the long run, I would make sure that you do the following things
(which have already been mentioned - but they're important so I'll
mention them again):
1. Make sure you have an alternate form of navigation. As you have
found out, the default navigation is JavaScript and cannot be followed
by search engine crawlers. For instance, http://www.starrynightgala.com/Site/Repertoire.html seems to be missing your alternate navigation.
2. In your navigation, make sure you use the full URLs for your own
domain. This helps to direct search engine crawlers to that version of
your site.
3. Try to change your site so that you have content on your root page
instead of "redirecting" it to a different URL. I don't know if this
is a limitation of your setup, so it may not be possible.
4. Make sure you don't accidentally activate the option that saves
text as images :-).
In general, if you want to use this website for the long run, it would
make sense to think about hosting it in a way that you have more
control. If you think that you may want to do that later on, then I
would move as soon as possible. The longer you wait with a move from a
limited hosting environment, the harder it will be to do properly. The
main problem is that you (as far as I know) do not have a way of
redirecting visitors and search engine crawlers directly to your own
website. This means that people (and crawlers) who only know your old
URL might have trouble finding your new site -- if you can move while
you're still somewhat unknown, it will not impact that many people
(and crawlers).
Dear Friends,
Thank you for taking the time to help me with this. In reading your
responses it seems that finding new hosting may be key to solving the
whole thing. This way there wouldn't be the duplicate/refresh issues
that are problems going from .Mac to StarryNight to the StarryNight
Welcome page. I did set up a Webmaster Tools and went through the
process or verifying and submitting a sitemap - and was told to submit
the sitemap for the .Mac since that is where the content is housed -
not the domain name. This may be incorrect info. I have to agree with
webado that in the final analysis that Mac isn't ready for prime time
-- this morning I just found that for the first time Google had
indexed 2 pages (ta,ta) - out of 8 (uh,oh). It's really a shame since
the ability to design a relatively attractive site with ease is
wonderful - too bad it creates so many problems!
Again, thank you all for your help.
> I think you already found some of the most important issues (the
> saving of text as an image is particularly troublesome with iWeb,
> grrr!). If you want to continue with your current hosting solution for
> the long run, I would make sure that you do the following things
> (which have already been mentioned - but they're important so I'll
> mention them again):
> 1. Make sure you have an alternate form of navigation. As you have
> found out, the default navigation is JavaScript and cannot be followed
> by search engine crawlers. For instance,http://www.starrynightgala.com/Site/Repertoire.html > seems to be missing your alternate navigation.
> 2. In your navigation, make sure you use the full URLs for your own
> domain. This helps to direct search engine crawlers to that version of
> your site.
> 3. Try to change your site so that you have content on your root page
> instead of "redirecting" it to a different URL. I don't know if this
> is a limitation of your setup, so it may not be possible.
> 4. Make sure you don't accidentally activate the option that saves
> text as images :-).
> In general, if you want to use this website for the long run, it would
> make sense to think about hosting it in a way that you have more
> control. If you think that you may want to do that later on, then I
> would move as soon as possible. The longer you wait with a move from a
> limited hosting environment, the harder it will be to do properly. The
> main problem is that you (as far as I know) do not have a way of
> redirecting visitors and search engine crawlers directly to your own
> website. This means that people (and crawlers) who only know your old
> URL might have trouble finding your new site -- if you can move while
> you're still somewhat unknown, it will not impact that many people
> (and crawlers).
> Hope it helps, good luck with your website!
> John
