Hi, Google's been having problems accessing my site, I have two urls added in google webmasters tools: technosites.co.uk and www.technosites.co.uk. on technosites.co.uk, its already verified but it won't let me add a sitemap ("General HTTP error: IP in excluded range") on www.technosites.co.uk its let me add a sitemap, but i can't verify ("We encountered an error looking up your site's domain name.") I recently moved my dns off my own server (behind a NAT) to a public 3rd party dns to try and solve these errors. doing dns checks on my domain, everything seems in order - but google still won't work probably all the correct ports i think are open on my router to forward to my server, dns, http, https, mail, and if other websites can check my site fine, whats wrong with google? Has it just not updated yet? Many Thanks, Technosites www.technosites.co.uk
Looks to be a common issue with not many answers. You might want to post something over at Google Groups as well, I seen someone mentioned the solved it after finding out that robot crawls were being blocked.
You should try contacting your host company. I had problems with some plugins accessing my site before, but my hosting company was able to fix it.
does googlebot work on a werid port, cos if it works on standard port 80 http it should be fine, port 80 gets forwarded to my webserver fine.... using an 3rd party dns it seems to have fixed itself over time, while i can just do ipconfig /flushdns it seems googles servers take longer to do that. quick question, i read something about using absolute links all the time not relative ones so not to confuse search engines, and to pick either www. or not and stick to it, should this be so? currently now i have both www.technosites.co.uk AND technosites.co.uk added to google sitemaps, will this make a good/bad difference? Thanks, Technosites
I'd typed up a big reply to this but DP failed to load and I lost everything...shite! Anyhow. Port 80 should be fine and I don't think Google uses anything weird. You might want to chase down an online tool and see it can crawl your site, see what comes up. Absolute vs relative is always a good question and most people either or depending on personal preference. I use absolute where I can but have no issues with relative either. As for the www. yes that can cause issues. Select 1 and use it only, you can tell Google (within Webmaster Tool CP) to index either www or without. Personally I only use www.mydomain.com and 301 redirect the http://mydomain.com into it. I also see your home page link goes back to the index page, redirect that also to the root of the domain i.e. www.yourdomain.com Google calls this url canonicalization - although they are getting to grips with the problem I would suggest you perform the 301 redirects as standard practice, its good all round for SEO purposes.