SEO Problems - De-listed, Not Crawled For Months!

Discussion in 'Search Engine Optimization' started by Adam Fletcher, Sep 23, 2007.

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  1. catanich

    catanich Peon

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    #21
    Hi Adam

    If you run a HTML Validation Check on you page you will find the reason. I have mastered this one. I was down for 2 months on this one.

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
    <html>
    <head>
    <title>Vegetable Gardening - Organic Vegetable Garden</title>

    See the hyphen. When you use the following default character set (oops, there isn't one). Therefore Google uses the default character set - UTF-8.

    UTF-8 does not support the hyphen, therefore error, therfore no index.

    Important Warnings
    The validator has found the following problem(s) prior to validation, which should be addressed in priority:

    No Character Encoding Found! Falling back to UTF-8.
    I was not able to extract a character encoding labeling from any of the valid sources for such information. Without encoding information it is impossible to reliably validate the document. I'm falling back to the "UTF-8" encoding and will attempt to perform the validation, but this is likely to fail for all non-trivial documents.

    Read the FAQ entry on character encoding for more details and pointers on how to fix this problem with your document.​



    Suggestion: Add the following "<META HTTP-EQUIV=""content-type""... It will work both in the UK and US. It is ISO's default character set.

    <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
    <html>
    <head>
    <META HTTP-EQUIV="content-type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
    <title>Vegetable Gardening - Organic Vegetable Garden</title>
    <meta name="description" content="Vegetable Gardening advice and guides. Practical advice for your organic Vegetable garden. This site include Gardening forums, blogs and guides." />
    <link rel="StyleSheet" type="text/css" href="about.css" />

    <meta name="verify-v1" content="yiYWNUnyNv7xA92llt0wS7HXzEtMXjyAdpUjr/CPUoI=" />
    </head>    ​

    This should help you get indexed again. I would also fix the other HTML Validation Errors.
     
    catanich, Sep 24, 2007 IP
  2. YoungMaster

    YoungMaster Peon

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    #22
    I doubt this is the problem. All the other pages on the site that are indexed in google share the same error, yet they remain in the index.


    Adam

    There have been a lot of people experiencing indexing problems lately, although they were having timeout errors rather than an unreachable error like yourself. Maybe they are connected. Here are the relevant links for you to check out.
    http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/014766.html
    http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Tools/browse_thread/thread/8b6b02cdc8583973/
    http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/014831.html
     
    YoungMaster, Sep 24, 2007 IP
  3. dinvasco

    dinvasco Peon

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    #23
    I have the same problem with my site.
    My homepage and pages were first indexed back in July and ranked high in Google. After 2 weeks, all pages indexed, but not the home page. Most of the pages haven't been cached since the 10th of August and no SE traffic.
    I searched "www.mydomain.com" in google. my site was not on the first page.
    I search "www.Vegetable-Gardens.co.uk", your site is not on the first page.

    I only have 37 inbound links, so "building links too fast" is not the cause of your problem.

    I did not see any errors in my webmaster tools.

    my website does not have duplicate content.

    So I believe your site has been placed in the sandbox.
     
    dinvasco, Sep 25, 2007 IP
  4. cookiemon007

    cookiemon007 Banned

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    #24
    cookiemon007, Sep 25, 2007 IP
  5. Adam Fletcher

    Adam Fletcher Well-Known Member

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    #25
    I haven't done anything naughty :D

    I have contacted the hosting company, I am going to make all the changes you suggest and hope that the site comes back into the index soon.

    Thanks everyone!
     
    Adam Fletcher, Sep 25, 2007 IP
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