My webpage was Ranked #1 for certain keywords and now Im not even Listed.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
Google hung the bait out there and I bit at it like some half-crazed crackhead needing a fix.
Jeez Louise! I hope there is some consolation prize behind door #3, because I got the rubber chicken behind #1. Lord help me!
I read the Google Sitemaps Help site and put a sitemap.xml file (like the one listed below) in my website root directory. I then submitted it to Google Sitemaps. I had one error because one of my URL's was not like the others. So I fixed my sitemap.xml file and resubmitted it to Google Sitemaps. I have No Errors, but Im Not being Indexed by Google at All!
Must I cut off my pinky finger to show my allegiance to Big Brother? or what?
Does Google Sitemaps have problems indexing Geocities Websites since they are basically subdomains of Geocities.com? Ive searched this newsgroup and the Webmaster Newsgroup and no one seems to definitely say this, so Im thinking its OK.
I have seen some threads saying that people are having problems after they change their sitemap.xml file and then resubmit to Google Sitemaps.
Ive been doing a lot of Head Banging without Metal Music.
Any words of Enlightenment would be music to this tortured webmaster.
A ran the W3C XML validator for MyWebsite sitemap.xml file and got the following;
(Im not showing my websites actual address just the code and the results)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----- Schema validating with XSV 2.10-1 of 2005/04/22 13:10:49 Target: http://www.geocities.com/MyWebsite/sitemap.xml (Real name: http://www.geocities.com/MyWebsite/sitemap.xml Length: 1980 bytes Last Modified: Mon, 09 Oct 2006 10:11:22 GMT) docElt: {http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84}urlset No declaration for document root found, validation was lax The schema(s) used for schema-validation had no errors No schema-validity problems were found in the target
Not recognised as W3C XML Schema or RDDL: html --------------------------------------------------------------------------- -----
Im not sure if this means its OK or Not.
Im not familiar with XML, especially Validation.
Any help in that department is appreciated.
I think the second part of the Validation looked at my websites HTML main file and didnt like that. I dont have a DTD (Document Declaration Type) in any of my HTML files because it conflicts with some Javascript Code that I use. Omitting the DTD declaration makes my webpages come out the way I want them to. Has this come back to haunt me?
Ho boy, yet another G sitemaps victim. You should have come here first and seen all the other countless victims of G sitemaps that are also in your exact same predicament. First, IMMEDIATELY REMOVE your sitemap from your website, AND from the webmaster console login area at G. Submit your domain back to G again and again in the conventional manner, then pray like hell you get your ranks back.
>Does Google Sitemaps have problems indexing Geocities Websites since >they are basically subdomains of Geocities.com? Ive searched this >newsgroup and the Webmaster Newsgroup and no one seems to definitely >say this, so Im thinking its OK
He's hosted on Geocities too, and has a pseudo domain name. It appears in the address bar, but that's not really the URL of the domain, it's still a Geocities URL as G sees it. Still have not yet determined if this is the cause of his deletion. Rick
If the web pages are invalid and especially if they are invalid to such an extent that block level code is broken they cnanot be crawled by Googlebot's "smart" robots, which intepret code rather than just read it in plain text. The golden rule is you don't submit crappy, broken sites to a rigurous scrutiny as that provided by the sitemap program, which employs robots programmed to parse web pages according to proper rules of building html code rather than just read plain text.
When you state that you do not have a DTD on your pages becauseitinterferes with some javscript that tells me the pages must be quite invalid and broken.
Of course if you sitemap is also badly formed, then that won't help at all.
The first thing that happens when a site is submitted to Gooogle sitemaps everything gets removed from teh index and it gets cralwed and indexed freshly. If now the pages are broken all your'e left with is your rubber chicken.
webado wrote: > The first thing that happens when a site is submitted to Gooogle > sitemaps everything gets removed from teh index and it gets cralwed > and indexed freshly. If now the pages are broken all your'e left with > is your rubber chicken.
That's not true. I'm in sitemap hell too and when I saw the number of pages I had indexed nosedive upon submitting my sitemap, I figured it was weeding out all the pages that were outdated or invalid. Nope, I found plenty of pages that I didn't ask it to index, and a chunk of my diminished index is stuff that's at least over four months old.
I do have one confession to make. The one bad URL that I had in my Sitemap.xml file I thought I had changed, I did not. So I changed it and resubmitted and now have the Sitemap summary listed below.
********* Google Sitemap Summary **********
No pages from your site are currently included in Google's index. Indexing can take time.
You may find it helpful to review our information for webmasters and webmaster guidelines. [?]
Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on Apr 29, 2006 .
You have submitted 1 Sitemaps. You have no Sitemap errors.
I guess Im in the Google Queue. Im going to tough it out to see if this bears and fruit. I was hoping that I would get something like the CNN example below where you have your homepage and then all your website links listed below. At least that was my impression when I signed up to Google Sitemap.
******** Google Sitemap CNN Example ********
CNN.com - Breaking News, U.S., World, Weather, www.cnn.com/ - 102k - Oct 13, 2006 - Cached - Similar pages
As far as HTML validation goes, most HTML validators have a coronary when they scan my site. My homepage has several javascripts, hidden text, No DTD declaration, mixture of DIVs with TABLES, and all kinds of garbage. I love it!
I have looked at it with a Lynx (text browser) and it seems to render OK. It shows the hidden text as well as the visible text which is fine. Based on this Im guessing it should be Crawled/Parsed OK by Search Engines and Bots.
I have one webpage I know probably is bypassed like a bad clot. Ive got DHTML, a couple IFRAMES, and Dynamic Web References to it (www.geocities.com/MyWebsite/Page1.html?IFrame1.html&IFrame2.html). I have it listed in Sitemap.xml file, so I will be interested to see if Google Sitemaps has the cahonas to crawl it.
You are nto asking it to index pages - you are submitting a site which starts with the homepage and will include all pages that cna be crawled from it unless they are exclued in robots directives. Don't think that the sitemap you submit drives the show. It doesn't. It supports it at best.
Hidden text? You really must not want to get crawled and indexed.
If the validators get stuck on a page so will Googlebot. Javascript navigation without mathcing <noscript> navigation means no navigation.
Nothing in your iframes belongs on the same page so unless you also have regular links to the iframes content (and they are pages on your site) those will not get crawled.
Don't even think of getting indexed and even less of getting high ranking until the site is valid AND crawlable in addition to a decent quantity of text content.
>I was hoping that I would get something like the CNN >example below ...
It's called "Sitelinks" and it's not something you can control. Google does them automatically based on an algorithm. Vanessa has a posting in the blog about it.
webado wrote: > The first thing that happens when a site is submitted to Gooogle > sitemaps everything gets removed from teh index and it gets cralwed > and indexed freshly. If now the pages are broken all your'e left with > is your rubber chicken.
Hmmmm .... if that is so, does Google yet bother to mention this extreme risk BEFORE people submit a sitemap? It seems mighty strange they don't plainly warn -- right up front -- about how and why this might happen.
Were such a warning plainly posted, I suspect we would see far fewer cries of anguish of the kind repeatedly posted here over the past couple of years. How this apparently deliberate and persistent omission reconciles with Googles policy not to be "evil" is a considerable mystery, since luring people to blindly walk into the equivalent of an open manhole creates an extreme moral hazard.
As far as I can tell Im back to where I started from.
My Homepage is back to being #1 for certain keywords. The SiteLinks that I thought would show under my Homepage SiteLink do not show. So basically the only webpage that got seriously indexed was my Homepage.
When I click on the "site: Indexed pages in your site site:www.geocities.com/MyWebsite" link, I only get my Homepage.
Im not even going to try to figure it out.
I agree with the comments above where maybe putting a <noscript> tag might help and maybe rewriting my website to make it idiot-proof for Bots,Crawlers, and Validators might help.
Its just too much trouble for now especially since its a Free information website with No commercial value.
I guess Ill chalk this up to experience.
Teknowbabble
*********** GOOGLE SITEMAP MANAGER ***************************** Pages from your site are included in Google's index. See Index stats. [?] Googlebot last successfully accessed your home page on Oct 17, 2006. You have submitted 1 Sitemaps. You have no Sitemap errors.
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