I recently create a website www.hokienuts.com After a while, my site
got picked up by google. The problem is that it is only indexing the
homepage, even though I have several other pages of content as well as
a message board.

This problem seems like it is common for many new sites.
http://groups.google.com/groups/sear...ly&qt_s=Search

I am very green to the SEO area, however I know that software is
supposed to be about solving problems. If Google wants to provide a
useful webmaster tool, why not give us a little more insight into what
is going on with our sites.

Little frustrating. I will keep quiet now, work on getting links to my
site and hope that every other new webmaster who is frustrated with
this problem bumps this thread so it will hopefully gets some
visibility.

On 12 Nov 2006 21:10:18 -0800, pkennedy@everestsoftwareinc.com wrote:

>I recently create a website www.hokienuts.com After a while, my site
>got picked up by google. The problem is that it is only indexing the
>homepage, even though I have several other pages of content as well as
>a message board.
>
>This problem seems like it is common for many new sites.
>http://groups.google.com/groups/sear...ly&qt_s=Search
>
>I am very green to the SEO area, however I know that software is
>supposed to be about solving problems. If Google wants to provide a
>useful webmaster tool, why not give us a little more insight into what
>is going on with our sites.
>
>Little frustrating. I will keep quiet now, work on getting links to my
>site and hope that every other new webmaster who is frustrated with
>this problem bumps this thread so it will hopefully gets some
>visibility.

You need to give Google a reason why it should put its valuable
resources to use detailing your site. Why would they want to bother?
If they indexed every crappy little site on the planet, think what it
would cost them! Server space! CPU power! Electricity! These days, you
have to give them a reason. We're seeing a shift away from idealism to
commercial pragmatism over at the Googs now, all that nonsense about
indexing all the world's info has gone by the board as they're
realised how much useless info is out there and how expensive it is
maintaining a record of it. Which leaves noob webmasters with a
problem, Google won't index your site till it deems it worthy of
inclusion, it won't deem it worthy till it sees other sites are
linking to it, but other sites won't know it exists till they can find
it in Google. Theoretically, anyhoo. So you'd best be off and get some
links from MSN (use heavy keyword density) and Yahoo (register for the
Yahoo Explorer program and put a ROR sitemap up of your site) and
quality directories <rant from Heenan goes here>RANT</rant from Heenan
goes here> and then the Great Googs might loftily condescend to
include all your site in its index.

And you thought this was going to be tricky!

BB
--

http://www.kruse.co.uk/seo-services.htm
http://www.kruse.co.uk/internet-marketing-uk.htm
http://www.here-be-posters.co.uk/

<pkennedy@everestsoftwareinc.com> wrote in message
news:1163394618.312427.288960@k70g2000cwa.googlegr oups.com...
>I recently create a website www.hokienuts.com After a while, my site
> got picked up by google. The problem is that it is only indexing the
> homepage, even though I have several other pages of content as well as
> a message board.
>
> This problem seems like it is common for many new sites.
> http://groups.google.com/groups/sear...ly&qt_s=Search
>
> I am very green to the SEO area, however I know that software is
> supposed to be about solving problems. If Google wants to provide a
> useful webmaster tool, why not give us a little more insight into what
> is going on with our sites.
>
> Little frustrating. I will keep quiet now, work on getting links to my
> site and hope that every other new webmaster who is frustrated with
> this problem bumps this thread so it will hopefully gets some
> visibility.
>
No definite answer to your problem, but here are some guesswork ideas that
may, or may not, .

The navigation does not join up properly, as your home page is just a pass
through one way page. You link out of the home page but the return links
all go back to a different name index.asp I suggest you never mention the
home page file name anywhere on your web pages, just link back to
http://www.hokienuts.com/ or to /. It is obvious that you think you have
just one home page, but a search engine and anyone who read the url line at
the top of their browser sees two identical content pages, but with
different url names.

The is something strange about many of the characters throughout the text.
They appear as black diamonds with tiny question marks in Firefox, or as
question marks in IE. I think you intended apostrophies, quote marks and
hyphens. Try adding a content language and check your character set works
as expected.

Your style is above your head, so the page does not validate. Put it inside
the head after the meta lines. Then check the whole page with a validator.
At the moment it soon fails with "too many errors". Start by fixing some
errors and repeat the validation check till all is clear.

If a script is javascript it is probably best to say so.

Be careful linking out. Use rel="nofollow" if they are links to dubious
sites. You must not link to sites that participate in link schemes etc.

The use of black and while backgrounds and black and white text on the same
page is risky. It is very easy to make a mistake and for the search engine
to perceive hidden text or links, even though it appears visible to you, the
viewer. You need to be so careful with such highly complex pages. You
need to print out the page and read through each line checking that the
logical background colour is specified to be different from the colour
specified for the text. Be specific; don't make assumptions based on what
browsers do.

Best regards, Eric.

Wow. Two very well thought out respones, thanks a lot guys. I am not
trained as a developer, so everything I code is a hack off another site
or message board.

So here is an update, I apologize for not getting back on sooner.

Shortly after I posted my message, I added a <meta
http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" /> line to
my pages based on another post that I saw. I added it both on the
index page and in my nav.asp include. (I wasn't sure where to put it,
but it doesn't seem to hurt anything.)

After only a few days, I now have 9 pages indexed. I have a hard time
believing anything externally changed, so this most have been the fix.


Strangely only 1 of my message board topics got picked up and not all
of them, but I am not too worried about that at this point.

I am currently being validated for the Yahoo Explorer program, thanks
for the tip. I'm going to do the funky character, script and style
fixes now.

I guess the assumptions is the biggest point for me to take away from
all this. I am sure somewhere in the webmaster tools, the great Goog
says you must declare a charset. That is a terribly easy thing for
someone to omit it seems. I probably was being a little to idealist
when I posted my original message, but hey, they give a way a ton of
other free tools. Why not expand this one?

Thanks again.

Eric Johnston wrote:
> <pkennedy@everestsoftwareinc.com> wrote in message
> news:1163394618.312427.288960@k70g2000cwa.googlegr oups.com...
> >I recently create a website www.hokienuts.com After a while, my site
> > got picked up by google. The problem is that it is only indexing the
> > homepage, even though I have several other pages of content as well as
> > a message board.
> >
> > This problem seems like it is common for many new sites.
> > http://groups.google.com/groups/sear...ly&qt_s=Search
> >
> > I am very green to the SEO area, however I know that software is
> > supposed to be about solving problems. If Google wants to provide a
> > useful webmaster tool, why not give us a little more insight into what
> > is going on with our sites.
> >
> > Little frustrating. I will keep quiet now, work on getting links to my
> > site and hope that every other new webmaster who is frustrated with
> > this problem bumps this thread so it will hopefully gets some
> > visibility.
> >
> No definite answer to your problem, but here are some guesswork ideas that
> may, or may not, .
>
> The navigation does not join up properly, as your home page is just a pass
> through one way page. You link out of the home page but the return links
> all go back to a different name index.asp I suggest you never mention the
> home page file name anywhere on your web pages, just link back to
> http://www.hokienuts.com/ or to /. It is obvious that you think you have
> just one home page, but a search engine and anyone who read the url line at
> the top of their browser sees two identical content pages, but with
> different url names.
>
> The is something strange about many of the characters throughout the text.
> They appear as black diamonds with tiny question marks in Firefox, or as
> question marks in IE. I think you intended apostrophies, quote marks and
> hyphens. Try adding a content language and check your character set works
> as expected.
>
> Your style is above your head, so the page does not validate. Put it inside
> the head after the meta lines. Then check the whole page with a validator.
> At the moment it soon fails with "too many errors". Start by fixing some
> errors and repeat the validation check till all is clear.
>
> If a script is javascript it is probably best to say so.
>
> Be careful linking out. Use rel="nofollow" if they are links to dubious
> sites. You must not link to sites that participate in link schemes etc.
>
> The use of black and while backgrounds and black and white text on the same
> page is risky. It is very easy to make a mistake and for the search engine
> to perceive hidden text or links, even though it appears visible to you, the
> viewer. You need to be so careful with such highly complex pages. You
> need to print out the page and read through each line checking that the
> logical background colour is specified to be different from the colour
> specified for the text. Be specific; don't make assumptions based on what
> browsers do.
>
> Best regards, Eric.