how does Google actually find a website?

[Evoir]

All of the sites i have built seem to have good google search results, but it seems to take a while. How does google decide to finally index a site? the current one in question is this: http://www.example.com

Any ideas? I can't really change the text on the page, but really, we are hoping that the home page be hit by searching soley on the words "Jane, Doe, filmmaker" and "Jane Doe" would do nicely. Google is all we are looking for at the moment. Ideas?

[Syneryder]

Have you submitted the front page using Google's Add URL (http://www.google.com/addurl.html) tool? That should be your first step. You can check if Google knows about your site just by searching on the domain name example.com - and at the moment, it says it doesn't know about the domain.

My understanding is that Google will add new listings next time the "Google Dance" happens (when they update their entire index). I believe this happens monthly. You only need to submit the front page, Google will crawl your site and add all the other pages - and from there, Google keeps crawling your page every now and then to see if it needs to update its listings.

If you're still having trouble getting listed Evie, let us know and a few of us can add a link on the front page of our sites. That's almost guaranteed to get you listed :)

PS: Another tip, your meta keywords and description should be inside the HEAD of the page - at the moment you've got them above the HEAD and in the HTML section. I hardly think that's stopping you from getting listed, but it's still good to give pages a quick run through the W3C Validator (http://validator.w3.org/).

[Andilinks]

All of Kohan's suggestions are quite good and I personally don't have anything to add, but here's the address of a forum where they obsess on Google 24/7. If you have any more questions you might want to check them out. They are quite helpful, I've had a number of arcane Google questions answered quickly.

http://www.seochat.com/viewforum.php?f=1

As of this writing there is a five page thread there begun on May 2 about the Google Dance which it seems began on Friday. Google usually does a
"deep-crawl" about two weeks prior to the dance so if your site was visited then it will probably show up in the results this weekend during the dance. If not you may have to wait another month... :(

The Google dance thread is a bit hard to understand though if you haven't seen one before, they use a lot of SEO jargon. But newbies are treated well. :)

Andi

[Evoir]

Thanks you guys! I fixed the meta tags, and fixed a couple alt tags, but I can't get it to validate using the layout I am using, it doesn't like some of the tags that I have there for design. Maybe I can do the same things another way?

Validator (http://validator.w3.org)

[Evoir]

Ok, I solved the validation issue, Netscape has a problem that i think requires a second style sheet, and I will add that later, and I have submitted to google. Cross your fingers! Maybe I'll add it to my home page for a couple weeks. (It is already listed on my clients pages, but maybe I'll create a new thing, where I promote or highlight my lastest clients work on my homepage, and this will help them get listed faster.

Thanks alot guys!
Evie

[Syneryder]

Wow Evie, I'm impressed! I didn't mean for you to go all the way and make the page HTML 4.01 compliant, that's always a pain to do but congrats on doing it! I gave up on HTML 4 compliance long ago, one reason I switched to XHTML.

In case it also helps (you may know this already) I noticed that you previously had some html in the BODY tag to remove the border around the edges of the page (I think it was MARGINWIDTH and MARGINHEIGHT?). You can achieve the same effect using CSS:

body {
padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
}

I forget if it's the margin or padding parameters you need, I just know the above is a magic incantation I throw into all my CSS files nowadays.

I'm still very impressed by that page, love the way it looks, love the colors!:QTthumb:

[Evoir]

hmmm. but didn't you suggest I use the validation tool?
You can achieve the same effect using CSS:

body {
padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
margin: 0px 0px 0px 0px;
}

Netscape 4.7 doesn't honor this. There is some @import stylesheet thingy that will deal with this. Once I figure it out, will post it here.

The way I build sites, it is not too hard to fix things like this, all the pages work off a dreamweaver template and ssi's, and only the center text, which does not contain any of the design does not get updated. It's a puzzle that I enjoyed solving. The validator is kinda fun ("ok, I've got it down to 3 errors!")

Thanks for the compliments. :) This is one of my "Starter Packages" and went very nicely (and quickly). I was happy, client was happy. All went well. I just started doing this fixed price Starter Package and am quite pleased with the way it has shifted my worklife. I am doing a pottery site next, and I think it is gonna be really pretty too. Pretty pottery. :D It is certainly nice when the client has nice images to work with.

Ok, laters.
E

[Evoir]

Ok, I think I fixed the margin issue in Netscape. Can you take a look in your browser and see if it screwed anything up? I am on Mac and in IE, Mozilla everything is flush left and top and bottom. In netscape, everything is flush left and top (not bottom, but I bet I can figure this out).
http://www.example.com

The solution was found on this page (http://www.19nine78.net/cssfaq/) found by using Google.

The exact fix was this:margin:0 works for both ie5+ and ns6+, padding:0 works for opera. This will replace the leftmargin="0" topmargin="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" attributes on the body tag

Can that be done in netscape 4?

Contrary to popular belief it can, you just need to use:

body{
margin:-10px 0 0 -10px
}

html body{
margin:0;padding:0
}

[Syneryder]

Ahh, if you're still developing for Netscape 4 just ignore me :) I've moved to XHTML and CSS, because I find it's easier to make compliant and it downgrades much more nicely in Netscape 3 and text mode browsers. But then, I only design sites for myself, I don't have to worry about client opinions and I'm prepared to take the financial hit if any potential customers visiting my site use NS4. I also don't design for IE *grin*

The CSS above does validate (try it through the CSS Validator (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/)). I throw all my CSS into external files that are used across multiple pages, this is the sort of code I use (it goes in the HEAD):

<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.namesuppressed.com/ns.css" type="text/css" media="screen"/>

http://www.namesuppressed.com/ns.css validates at the time of writing, although it has a few warnings (which may or may not be fixed by the time you read this). Anyway, I'm mainly just providing this info in case anyone searches on this thread, the site still looks great as it is so no need to change :)

[EDIT: was typing while you posted, will reply in a minute]

[Evoir]

my CSS validated without any tweaks! my my! Yeah, I use external sheets, too. Makes updates a breeze! I'm even too efficient sometimes.

[Syneryder]

All of these are PC browsers (if I was on my Mac I'd also spin it through Safari, iCab and Opera for you)

IE 5.5: Flush left and top, bit of a gap at the bottom
Mozilla 1.2.1: Flush top and left, smaller gap at bottom
Opera 5.11: Flush top, left and bottom. Perfect.
Opera 6.05: Flush top and left, teeny tiny gap at bottom
Opera 7.10: Flush top, left and bottom. Also perfect.
Netscape 3.01 Gold: Handles well, relatively speaking

Unfortunately I don't have Lynx or WebTV Emulator installed at the moment, and the comp with Netscape 1.1 isn't connected to the net today ;) But it looks good.

[Evoir]

:) thanks.

[Randall]

Originally posted by Evoir:
In netscape, everything is flush left and top (not bottom, but I bet I can figure this out). NS4 (on Windows, anyway) has problems with full-height tables if there's not enough content to "stretch" them. This becomes especially obvious on high-res monitors.

Edit: Never mind, I see you're not using height="100%" after all.

Looks OK with the WebTV viewer. ;)

Randall

[Andilinks]

It looks great from here... The only browser that hasn't been tried (that I have installed) is Netcaptor which renders it exactly as IE6 does.

Netcaptor btw, is a lot like IE with tabs (but no Google bar) the only feature I have found really impressive though (so far) is that the trial version only counts the days that you actually use it. :)

And for the record, those guys at SEOchat are still debating as to why the Google Dance hasn't started yet and why Google may have changed it so that we may never know...

I followed the Google dance debate closely there one time several dances ago. Now I just barely notice when it happens, and then because it is when the PageRanks change. But that SEOchat is definitely the place to go for minutia about Google, they debate every twitch.

Other than submitting the URL though, the only thing I have noticed to accelerate Google rank is incoming links on pages with a good PR. I've added the Jane Doe link to my Film category here (http://www.andilinks.com/ent.htm)(it couldn't hurt, that page has a PR4 and recently traffic has spiked--though there are a lot of other links there too.) You can tell your client you got her that link. :)

Andi

[Evoir]

Hey, I want to thank everyone here for your help. Still no action. Does it hurt to re-submit? Could it help?

[Evoir]

Nevermind (http://www.seochat.com/topic.php?t=2242)

:)

[Andilinks]

Does it hurt to re-submit? Could it help? Since it has been nearly 30 days I think it would be safe. More often may irritate them, though who knows, they are so mysterious. Right now their algorithm seems to be undergoing an overhaul, or at least that's what I gather from the forums I've read.

All my PageRanks have plummeted but the Google referrals remain constant. Earlier experience has been that when the PR drops traffic does too. Speculation that I've read seems to concur that Google is making big changes in the way it ranks sites--which may be why your indexing is delayed.

Andi

[Syneryder]

Aww man, that can't be good news for you Evie :( Is there anything we can do to help, any kind of specific exposure you're after? I don't think I've got any sites that appeal directly to the target audience, but if there's any kind of special feature I could run for you or something, let me know.

[Evoir]

Still nothing listed whatsoever for http://www.example.com

When you type example.com in google, it says it has nothing listed for it. Very sad. Could it be that google does not like the home page, because there is so little text on it?

[Andilinks]

My Google search on the word "Doe" returned her site as result number 12. Unfortunately not on the first default page, but not so bad for a new website.

Andi :)

<edit> A search on "Jane Doe" returns the site as result number one, as you might expect. </edit>

[Andilinks]

Oh, and my Google toolbar shows a PageRank of 2, again not so bad for a new site.

[Evoir]

wow! I was just checking like this (google search link to domain removed) and it was saying it didn't acknowlege it. Thanks for pointing this out. :D

[frankc]

A Google for Doe Films brings it up as hits #1 & 2, as does a

Google for Jane Doe...strange that there're no hits for the www-less DN, as it's the sole hit (an unusual link) for www.example.com[/URL].

Put the www-less phrase in the keyword and title meta tags and see wha' hoppens. Those tags are sorta thin (nudge, nudge)...;)

How peculiar... :blinks: