Hi, Dishusa ~
Please remember that Google Answers Researchers are independent
contractors. As such, we are not privy to inside information about
Google. We do not have access to any information about Google's
closely-guarded search engine algorithms, nor to information on which
sites, if any, Google may have penalized or banned from its index.
Google, who obviously *does* know, may not tell you either. In its
"Webmaster Information, Reasons Your Site Isn't Showing" states, "We
will not comment on the individual reasons a page was removed and we
do not offer an exhaustive list of practices that can cause removal."
In other words, there are a lot of reasons Google may ban a site, many
of them are listed in Google's "Webmaster Information" and its
"Guidelines", but they probably won't tell you if you have been banned
or why.
Most of us Google Answers Researchers who undertake answering
questions concerning Google's indexing or PageRank do so from a
position of experience and knowledge gleaned from reputable sources,
such as Danny Sullivan's "Search Engine World" -
- http://searchengineworld.com
or Webmaster World -
- http://webmasterworld.com
and other search engine information resources.
================================
So, What happened to your site?
================================
Google has ten index data centers. Because of the size of its index,
it is physically impossible for it to simultaneously update all the
data centers. I performed searches for your site using
"www.dishusa.com" (without the exclamation marks) on each of the data
centers:
- www-ex.google.com - site is listed - PageRank 4/10
- www-sj.google.com - " - "
- www-va.google.com - " - "
- www-dc.google.com - " - "
- www-fi.google.com - " - "
- www-ab.google.com - " - "
- www-in.google.com - " - "
- www-zu.google.com - " - "
- www-cw.google.com - " - "
- www-gv.google.com - " - "
I tried a search about four hours ago on each of the servers and sure
enough, your site wasn't listed. Later, at 10:28 pm, PDT, the site was
listed on all of the servers.
The good news is: You apparently have not been dropped or banned from
Google's Index.
Using Google's LINK:Tool, some of the data centers returned links,
others didn't. I also found you *DO* have a Google PageRank of 4/10,
so something is going on here.
[You can download the Google Toolbar here - http://toolbar.google.com/
- install it and see your PageRank.]
[The Google LINK:Tool is accomplished by typing "link:
www.dishusa.com" (without the quotation marks) in the search box.]
[If you want an unofficial look at Google's data centers, you can use
the "Google Dance" tool on SEO Chat. This site is not related to
Google in any way, but it does offer the tool to watch the returns
from each of the data centers.
- http://googledance.seochat.com ]
=================================
Reasons Your Site May Not Appear
=================================
Google explains some reasons your page may not appear:
"* 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 com-
pleted in a few weeks.
* 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.
* The contents of your page or the links pointing
to your page changed significantly and you no
longer have a sufficiently high PageRank, or
your page had low PageRank to begin with and a
small change caused you to be dropped from the
Google index.
* Your page was manually removed from our index,
because it did not conform with the quality
standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank.
We will not comment on the individual reasons a
page was removed and we do not offer an exhaus-
tive list of practices that can cause removal.
However, certain actions such as cloaking,
writing text that can be seen by search engines
but not by users, or setting up pages/links with
the sole purpose of fooling search engines may
result in permanent removal from our index."
(From: Reasons Your Site Might Not Appear)
- ://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html#A1
==================
About Those Links
==================
A check on AllTheWeb - http://alltheweb.com - returns:
"Find all 185 external web pages that link to "www.dishusa.com"
Find all 128 external web pages that contain the term
"www.dishusa.com"
Find all 49 web pages indexed under "www.dishusa.com"
Notice there are far more links listed on AllTheWeb than are listed on
Google. Among those are:
Power Submissions - Google PageRank 0/10
http://www.powersubmissions.com/Links/links.html
So Far 2 Go - Google PageRank 0/10
http://www.sofar2go.com/
Wine Consignor - Google PageRank 0/10
http://www.wineconsignor.com/Links/links.shtml
Fortune Biz Link Exchange - Google PageRank 0/10
http://www.fortunebiz.com/Link_Exchange/link_exchange.shtml
Gilliam Hardwood Flooring - Google PageRank 0/10
http://www.gilliamhardwoodflooring.com/Link_Exchange/link_exchange.html
There are others, but I chose these from AllTheWeb's first page or two
of links to www.dishusa.com.
The significance of the above becomes apparent, when you take into
consideration Google's admonishments about linking schemes:
"Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's
ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or
"bad neighborhoods" on the web as your own ranking may be affected
adversely by those links." (See Google's "Quality Guidelines - Basic
principles")
- ://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
Google also explains in its discussion of its PageRank:
"PageRank Explained
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using
its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value.
In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote,
by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume
of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that
casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important"
weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."" (See:
Page Rank Explained)
- ://www.google.com/technology/index.html
This is an excellent time to consider the PageRank of those pages
linking to yours. They are nothing but "links" with no relevancy to
their own site's content, and a Google PageRank of 0 (PR0). They
aren't helping you, and could very well harm your own listing,
especially if they are perceived as a link scheme.
I would definitely recommend dropping those links and instead
promoting links to and from relevant sites.
Webmaster World's Google News Discussion Forum contains numerous
anecdotal incident of sites being dropped for just such linking
schemes. I highly recommend you take some time and visit the site,
paying careful attention to threads relative to links. Webmaster
World's site can be found here:
- http://www.webmasterworld.com
and the Google discussions, including the most recent changes in
Google's algorithm and the most recent Google Dance in Google News
discussions here:
- http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/
Articles on Link Popularity
===========================
I took the liberty of providing a couple of excellent articles on how
to establish the right kind of links. These are available in
Traffick's "Ten Steps to Building Links to Your Site", Craig Fifield -
5/3/2002
- http://www.traffick.com/article.asp?aID=77
and "The Right Way to Improve Link Popularity", By Paul J. Bruemmer -
4/14/2002 -
- http://www.traffick.com/article.asp?aID=41
Notice both articles offer suggestions which can be easily adapted for
use on any website without resorting to link farms. They both point
out the differences and offer easy ways to get started to the kind of
linking search engines, and particularly Google, prefer.
===============================
Search Engine Submission Sites
===============================
If you are using Power Submissions for dishusa.com, you may want to
rethink. There are many so-called search engine optimization (SEO)
sites which make absurd promises to rank you in the "top ten" for a
particular search term or submit your site to "over 750,000 search
engines".
Using those types of services is throwing your money away. No
legitimate SEO firm would make such an absurd promise - search engines
change their algorithms often enough that there is no way to make such
a guarantee. As for "over 750,000 search engines", the truth is that
only a handful of search engines really matter for 99% of the visitors
you wish to attract.
Google has devoted an entire page to SEOs which, again, is a good rule
of thumb for getting listed in any of the top search engines. You can
find it here:
- ://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html
Reputable SEO firms will also hand-submit your site to the search
engines. Google admonishes about the use of submission software in its
"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."
- ://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
That is another reason to avoid submission services with promises to
submit your site to a bazillion search engines. They have got to be
using automated software to do so, which can get their customers
penalized or even banned.
===================
Meta Tags & Google
===================
For the most part, Google gives little weight to meta tags and weighs
page content more heavily. (See the explanation of Page Rank above).
This was obviously to circumvent those who would try to load the meta
tags to give them a better return on search engines, even if they
didn't necessarily offer much relevant content.
Using Google Search, I can't find your site listed in the top 100
pages for the terms "dish network", "satellite tv", "satellite dish",
"dish tv" and other of the keyword meta tags you have listed.
Checking your word density, using searchengineworld.com's Keyword
Density Tester - http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/kwda.cgi -
shows that these words *do* appear in your page's content, so it would
appear there is a different problem. Some of the pages that do appear
in those first 100 aren't as relevant as dishusa.com is.
However, running your page through the searchengineworld.com's HTML
Validator - http://www.searchengineworld.com/validator/ - returns 91
errors.
Shari Thurow, one of the leading authorities in search engine
optimization, and author of the book "Search Engine Visibility",
recently observed the following about HTML:
"Clean HTML is absolutely imperative for search engine indexing.
Browsers are extremely forgiving when it comes to displaying pages
with "unclean" HTML (unclosed tags, no quotation marks, etc.). Search
engine spiders are not so forgiving. Even something as simple as a
missing quotation mark on the <.a href="page.html"> can cause a spider
to not index text or a link." (See: Link Exchange Digest, July 3,
2003, "Clean HTML")
- http://list.audettemedia.com/SCRIPTS/WA.EXE?A2=ind0307&L=led&D=1&T=0&H=1&O=D&F=&S=&P=282
Differentiating between search engine indexing and search engine
ranking, she explained how errors in HTML can affect your ability to
be indexed, and ultimately, ranked.
I suspect cleaning up the scripting and HTML errors may give you
better search engine placement for the terms you want.
The page "looks" okay in some browsers (and not so great in others,
such as Netscape 4.x, and IE 5.x and earlier), but those errors are
probably impeding your chances for better placement within Google for
the terms you want.
Put those ALT tags to work for you
===================================
You are missing ALT tags for some graphics, and on others you have
empty ALT tags.
Google cannot read graphics, so the ALT tags are an excellent
opportunity to add *relevant* content to your site. Don't overdo it,
either, as spamming the ALT tags can be detrimental and get you
penalized.
=================================
Understanding the Search Engines
=================================
It's a fact of life that just about the time one figures they have
this search engine optimization thing all figured out, the search
engines will change their algorithms enough to make it all confusing
once again.
To keep up with the "thou shalts" and "thou shalt nots" of search
engine optimization, check in with both Danny Sullivan's Search Engine
Watch -
- http://www.searchenginewatch.com
and Webmaster World -
- http://webmasterworld.com
In addition, Shari Thurow's book, "Search Engine Visibility", with a
forward by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Watch, is available on
Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Her accompanying website to use in
conjunction with the book is here:
- http://www.searchenginesbook.com/
The Link Exchange Digest, one of the first and longest-running
Internet marketing and search engine/linking newsletters, is an
excellent tool with information beneficial to most website and small
business owners. It is free to subscribe, and there is always some
helpful information to be derived from each issue. You can subscribe
by mailing to led-join-request@list.audettemedia.com.
The Adventive lists have been taken over by Andrew Bourland under his
new enterprise, Up2Speed. Andrew Bourland who also started ClickZ and
other informative websites. The I-Sales, I-Search and I-Design lists
currently have search engine discussions going, and you may want to
subscribe to those lists to help stay current. The Up2Speed
subscription page is here:
- http://www.up2speed.com/
You may be pleasantly surprised with how many ideas and new "friends"
eager to lend a hand that you may find by becoming a subscriber to
those lists. The average subscriber is usually the type of
entrepreneur who would seem to be your target market as well.
=========================
Maintaining Your Listing
=========================
It appears that you have a decent Google PageRank and have not been
banned, or at least not at the time of answering this question.
I have no idea why your site did not appear earlier for me and was not
there when you posted your question, but I am sure you wish to
maintain what you have at the present time.
Be careful of your links, you do *not* want to be penalized for being
a part of a linking scheme. Correct the HTML errors to make it easier
for the Googlebot to index and find all your pages; and be sure not to
use unauthorized automation to submit or check your site, and you
should be able to remain indexed in Google.
I know this is more information than you requested. However, if you
were banned from Google, we'd not be able to find your page at all,
even using www.dishusa.com. The fact that you're not placing higher in
the search engine results are most likely due to the HTML errors,
which when corrected, should give you better placement.
==================
Search Strategies
==================
- dishusa.com
- search engine placement
I also relied on personal bookmarks, including recent discussions from
some of the lists mentioned above and formulated this answer based
upon my own experience as a web designer/developer, working with
search engine optimization specialists.
If you have any questions about the information, suggestions or links
provided herein, please, feel free to ask.
Best wishes for better search engine placement,
Serenata |
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