Google

We are a new website, built to generate excitement about our 45th high school class reunion in 2007, and to make contact with classmates for whom we have no mailing addresses.

On January 11 I submitted the site to Google and set up a Google search utility. I noticed that it was not working. On further investigation it seems that until Google "crawls" my site and builds the index, it will not function.

Well, still today it doesn't work. I have submitted the site to Google multiple times, and have enlisted my committee to search for our site at Google as often as they think about it, but still no soap.

Do you know how I can get Google to crawl my site? I did a bit of exploring about this, and even signed up for Add.com, and created an xml document, but still no soap.

Should I be looking at implementing some other site search utility? Any suggestions? Site search is so very important to a site like ours! Until I get it up, the value to visitors is considerably diminished.

Many thanks for all suggestions.

Joyce

Scribe for the Reunion Committee
Overton High School, Classes of '62, '63, and '64

The easiest way to get Google to crawl your site I've found it to link to your site from another site that is already being crawled by Google, I've never submitted a site to Google through their submission tool but all of my sites generally are crawled within a few days of the a link to the new site appearing.

Since this forum is crawled by Google, change your signature to be a hyperlink with the anchor text as "Overton High School, Classes of '62, '63, and '64", within a week you should have seen Googlebot come by your site.

Also be sure that you are not using meta tags such as "<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow">" in the source of your web site, this will stop any bots from indexing your site.

Your site (home page only) is in Google, bottom of page 1 (for me, now):
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q="Overton+First!"+Graduating+Classes

This previous thread may give you some ideas.

I'm not a SEO (search engine optimization) expert, but here's a couple comments:

Your keywords repeat several words, like "Overton Overton Overton Overton Overton Overton." I don't think Google likes this tactic, and would prefer one of each.

Your pages are separated into multiple, extended directories, like: http://www.overtonfirst.net/classmates/class63/index.html

I think Google would prefer more like: http://www.overtonfirst.net/class63.html

You've got text at bottom of the home page with only slight contrast from the background. I think Google suspects that might be a trick.

Good luck,

BobS

I am also having problems with getting my site crawled by google.
And Yahoo, and MSN.
I did the basics, go to their site and submit request to get added into their search enging. That was about 1 week ago, I know i am probably going to wait longer
I know google ranking is dependant on how many links on other websites point to my site, so I have asked my friends to start adding my link on their page.

anyone have any other suggestions for google or yahoo search rankings?
(I am not trying to get rank#1, just any result in their search)

~ Improve Our Democracy
~ www.ddemocracy.net

In reply to:

---

anyone have any other suggestions for google or yahoo search rankings?
(I am not trying to get rank#1, just any result in their search)

~ Improve Our Democracy
~ www.ddemocracy.net

---

See the previous thread, and fix your links like in your sig'. That's hilarious. Anything without the colon in the url goes to u$oft. http://http//anywhere-but-there.com or copy/paste: http//not-that-os.net

Cheers,

BobS

> Thanks, I'll look at fixing those.
>
> My other problem is that the site search (from Google) still does not
> work. How can I get that working? Am I doing something wrong there?
>
> And if I look for "joyce wilcox and overton" which should be a direct
> hit, I get no hits on my site at all. That's what I want the most --
> someone goes looking for one of our classmates, and up we pop.
>
> Joyce

Scribe for the Reunion Committee
Overton High School, Classes of '62, '63, and '64

As far as I can tell Google has only indexed the front page of your web site thus far, this is the reason "joyce wilcox and overton" does not show a related page.

You can check what pages have been indexed by Google using the "site:" command in Google search.

Example;
site:www.overtonfirst.net

It is indexing it, has 25 pages in its cache:
25 from www.overtonfirst.net

Im having a problem trying to get my website searchable. I contacted google,etc and submitted the site www.uvart.com under different headings(and this was months ago), but when I try to search it out it never comes up.
We had someone design the site. so I dont know html,etc or anything about meta-tags,etc. seems like we wasted $5,000 on a stagnant website.

Your site is in Google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.uvart.com&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

Google can't read content in Flash though. Since your site appears to be built entirely in Flash, Google won't be able to see, index or search any of the content.

> 25 from www.overtonfirst.net

"of about 83 from overtonfirst.net" less than a day later.

And,

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q="joyce+wilcox"+overton

is now Number 1!

BTW, This discussion page is already top 10 for "Joyce Wilcox" alone. :-)

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q="joyce+wilcox"

Probably because of the thread Subject title...

Cheers,

BobS

how do I make so you can find the site using keywords?

Hey all,

I am new to web design and seem to be having the same problem that others are having. I submit to yahoo, google etc and nothing. So I am doing what others suggest and putting my webpage in my signature in hopes that it will get crawled. If anyone has any pointers let me know.

Thanks,

Herschel

www.whackerusa.com

Well, I'm not an expert in regards to getting listed and improving one's listing order, but you could try adding these two meta tags between <head> and </head> in your page files:

<meta name="keywords" content="Whacker Technologies, public safety, equipment"> (these keywords are examples; use whatever ones you want, as many as you want, but don't repeat them...Google doesn't like that)
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> (change it to "nofollow" if you don't want a page indexed)

Jen
http://www.SassyDevil.com/

The #1 way to increase traffic to your site is to get other popular sites to link to use. This is also the best way to get google to increase your ranking.

After that, things like descriptive links, using HTML & CSS rather than flash or images (eg, the mast of your site is just one big image with image maps.) At least use title attributes on the links from your nav.

What does this meta tag do <meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> ?

Also, with regards to the image maps...how do I add description to the links and title attributes?

(This is the first time I ever made a website) I am using dreamweaver for the editing.

Thanks for the posts up until now!

Herschel

www.whackerusa.com

<quote>What does this meta tag do <meta name="robots" content="index,follow"> ?
</quote>
It does the exact same thing if you don't add it. It allows the search engine bots to index your site and to follow the links. This tag is only necessary if you want to change this default behavior. Other options are (nofollow, noindex, and noarchive).
Once you start adding multiple pages, you are better off(in my opinion) using the robots.txt file in your root domain folder. This will keep track of what directories the search engines can not access. But remember, that the meta tag and the robots.txt file are for search engines that follow the rules so to speak. They do not stop spam bots or help much in keeping your private data private.