Hi Duncan ~
Please understand that Google Answers Researchers are not employees of
Google and we are not privy the the workings of Google's search engine
rankings. Google closely guards its search algorithms, so it would be
hard to give you an adequate "technical conclusion" for your site's
particular fluctuations. I can, however, make some educated guesses
and offer some suggestions.
The Googlebot does a massive crawl every 4 to 6 weeks, indexing the
entire web. During this time Website page rankings and search results
often change, even from one moment to the next. Fluctuations in search
results rankings can occur for any number of reasons and are the
subject of a lot of speculation and research by webmasters.
In no particular order, I will address some of the issues you have
raised in your question.
1. Submitting to Google:
You said "I use Site Screamer submission service only for submitting
my site every 31 days".
Google's Webmaster Guidelines [at
://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html ] state under
"Quality Guidelines - Basic principles"
"Don't use unauthorized computer programs to submit pages, check
rankings, etc. Such programs consume computing resources and violate
our terms of service. Google does not recommend the use of products
such as WebPosition Gold™ that send automatic or programmatic queries
to Google."
=====================
2. Reasons your site may have been dropped:
a.) You said, "In January, I had to switch hosting companies 3 times
in a 3 week period due to poor customer service and the need for
better stats reporting. I have been at my current (and final!) host
since 2/14/03."
That has been less than a month, and it may simply be that Google was
unable to find your site. In Google's Webmaster Tips, "B. My web pages
used to be listed and now they aren't.", some possible explanations
are:
"If your site was dropped from Google and you have not made major
changes to it in the last month, we will likely pick it up again in
our next index. It's possible your site was simply inaccessible when
our robots tried to crawl it." or
"It's also possible your rank decreased because other sites were found
and assigned a higher rank."
- ://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html
Note that Google recommends "You may want to check and see if the
number of other sites linking to your URL has decreased. This is the
single biggest factor in determining what sites are indexed by Google,
as we find most pages when our robots crawl the web and jump from page
to page via hyperlinks."
b.) Your site wasn't available when Google indexed:
- ://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html
Under No. 3, Other reasons, "Your site may not have been reachable
when we tried to crawl it because of network or hosting problems. When
this happens, we retry multiple times, but if the site cannot be
crawled, it will not be listed in our current index. If it was a
transient problem, your site will likely show up in the next index,
which will be completed in a few weeks."
c.) A technical glitch:
- ://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html
Also under No. 3, Other Reasons, "A technical glitch on our side may
have caused us to 'miss' your site. In crawling more than 3 billion
pages every few weeks, our system experiences hiccups from time to
time. Again, this is a transient problem, and your site will likely
show up in the next index. Please be patient with us during this
period, as we are not able to modify our index by hand to add sites
missed in this way.
=================
3. Recommendations
a.) Alt tags -
Google recommends, "Make sure that your TITLE and ALT tags are
descriptive and accurate."
- Design and Content Guidelines
://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
While rather long, your title is descriptive, "Guaranteed golf
instruction online, golf swing secrets, golf tips, golf ebooks!", but
you do not use ALT tags for your images.
b.) Links to your page -
Google states in its Webmaster Information,No. 2, Submitting Your Site
(last paragraph), "The best way to ensure Google finds your site is
for your page to be linked from lots of pages on other sites. Google's
robots jump from page to page on the Web via hyperlinks, so the more
sites that link to you, the more likely it is that we'll find you
quickly."
- ://www.google.com/webmasters/1.html#A1
While you have healthy and relevant links TO other sites, a check of
links to your own page using Google's link tool does not return any
sites with links to your site.
c.) Other search engines -
I tried a search under dmoz and I was not able to find your site using
the search terms "golf books +videos" or in their categories "sports:
golf: instruction", which seems the logical places to list the site.
- http://dmoz.org/Sports/Golf/Instruction/
Your site is not listed in Alta Vista - http://www.altavista.com
nor with Yahoo - http://www.yahoo.com
In its Webmaster Tips, Google recommends, "... you may want to
consider submitting your site to either or both of these directories.
You can submit to Yahoo! by visiting
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/. You can submit your site to
Netscape's Open Directory Project (DMOZ) by
visiting www.dmoz.org. Once your site is included in either of these
directories, Google will often index your site within six to eight
weeks."
d.) Google's FAQs -
Do pay attention to Google's FAQs at
://www.google.com/webmasters/faq.html
While you are eager to get your site listed again in Google, the FAQs
outline certain practices which may be harmful, and you wouldn't want
to use those and jeopardize your chances of being re-indexed and
included in Google.
e.) There is a plethora of information about search engines and search
engine placement on the internet. Among those recognized as being a
foremost authority is Search Engine Watch. Danny Sullivan is
recognized as an expert in search engine optimization, and visiting
the site and paying attention to his news and updates will be of
tremendous help to you. The site is at:
- http://www.searchenginewatch.com
=======================
4. Personal observation and recommendation -
On a personal note, your site took almost 2 minutes to load on a 56K
dialup modem, and it took 45 seconds on a cable modem, 48 seconds on
DSL. That is a considerably long time to wait for a page to appear,
and it may be causing you some sales from the visitors you are getting
to your site.
You may want to consider breaking some of the information into
linkable pages (with clearly delineated text links for Google's bot,
of course) in order to facilitate faster loading.
=====================
Search strategies and site(s) -
* Google Information for Webmasters
- ://www.google.com/webmasters/
* Google How Do I Get My Site Listed On Google?
- ://www.google.com/webmasters/1.html
* Google My Pages Are Not Currently Listed
- ://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html
* Google Quality Guidelines fof Webmasters
- ://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html#quality
I hope this helps answer your questions and that you are relisted in
Google soon.
Yours,
Serenata |
Clarification of Answer by
serenata-ga
on
12 Mar 2003 18:09 PST
Hi again, Duncan ~
Interesting ... I did a search using your terms
"instantgolflesson.+com", and got three pages of results. Your site,
proper, was on the third page, and the rest had pages that mentioned
your site and/or had links to it.
Why it doesn't show directly in the link tool could be any of the
reasons I mentioned above, and any reason I might give would be pure
speculation. The fact that you are indexed in this rather indirect way
does indicate that you are in the index, however obscurely.
With regard to DMOZ: When I use a dialup service to access the
Internet, your site doesn't show ... when I use cable (cox.net) or
DSL, it does. This would lead me to believe the dialup is feeding
cached pages - but again, that's speculation. Their route to Google
and DMOZ are quite different, too.
In answer to your question, yes, you *are* in Google's database,
although the site isn't easy to find directly. The very best I can
offer is to watch your site's stats for when either the next fresh.bot
or google indexes again and see if you don't reappear. As you pointed
out, you're there, just buried.
If you don't show up in the next four weeks or so, you may want to
resubmit it and/or contact Google to see if you can get a definitive
answer form them. I suspect, though, that it will not be necessary to
do so.
Hope this helped,
Serenata
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