Hello - my website has been up and active for a little over a month now. Only the index page is indexed on google and yahoo. I have both google and yahoo sitemaps, as well as my own HTML sitemap loaded and updated whenever changes are made. All my pages are W3C validated. MSN is starting to return me to page 1 or 2 on many keyword searches. Yet, on my google stats page, there continues to be nothing showing. Uptimebot just ran a check, and it shows that google considers my site, www.a1-outdoors.com to be a mirror of a1-outdoors.com/. Is this some error I committed during submission, and I need to rectify something? Seems I am squarely in the sandbox - and forgive the duplicate posts, but this uptimebot report is a new finding and I wonder if it is related. Many opine the sandbox does not exist, many say the opposite. I really don't know what to do next - I have submitted to some directories, have posted fresh content pages daily, and started to submit offsite articles linking back. I am learning about blogs and how they may help. But I don't want to only dig deeper (if, in fact, I'm mired in sand) by making wrong moves, such as mass directory submissions (not farms, but considering the $20 hand-submission options bandied about here and there). Hmmm. Big topic. What's a newbie to do? Any help would be appreciated. Paul
You can add mod_rewrite code to your .htaccess to redirect all traffic to the site with www on it. Code as follows: RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.a1-outdoors\.com [NC] RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.a1-outdoors/$1 [L,R=301] Keep building links, not to fast though. Sometimes it can take quite a qhile to get google SERPs, good luck...
ServerUnion - I made these changes. The problem is that my host account seriously crashed with this script in place. I don't know why - they don't either. Having the script in place redirected "a1-outdoors.com" to "www.a1-outdoors.com", but with this script in place, my ability to publish from Frontpage was nil - I kept getting a "you don't have permission ..." and my local and remote files were unmatched, and from the host's side, they said with the script intact, they got a 302 when trying to get to my index page. So, my question is, is it actually a problem if people can get to me either way - either by "www.a1-outdoors.com", or a1-outdoors.com? Is this truly viewed as duplicate content by google? More, does google hate mirror sites?
OK, found the problem. Changed vti_bin .htaccess files (in the bin, in *adm, and in *aut) from Options None to Options +FollowSymLinks. Knock on wood, domain.com now resolves to www.domain.com and I can publish in FP. Hope this helps anyone else going through the problem (and Microsoft should rectify this). Thanks, ServerUnion and others. Paul