I am inquiring about the web site
www.liferoot.com 
which redirects to
http://liferoothealing.homestead.com/

I can't get this site to show up on any google searches 
(other than searching on the link name itself).

(Note that when I check the google cache, it indicates the
page is cache:http://liferoothealing.homestead.com/Index~ns4.html,
and that the page is *not* cached)

Is there anything about the page source itself that is
stopping Google from indexing this site? (Homestead
advises that othere Homestead based sites generally do not have 
problems.)

---

Clarification of Question by liferoothealing-ga on 06 Sep 2003 15:56 PDT

Similar content appears on other pages and is found by Google.
For instance, a search on:
"Timeless Goddess Body Bath Massage Oil"
does turn up on google at

http://artofdiet.com/catalog/default.php
http://www.sunforcenatural.com/lronline.html

Detailed searches with exact text from the web site fail
to turn up, suggesting that the page is not indexed at all?

---

Request for Question Clarification by webadept-ga on 08 Sep 2003 01:20 PDT

Hi, 

You might want to look at the Google FAQ's about this. Redirects are
rarely listed in any real way, meaning you normally get exactly what
you are getting. The page is "known" by the search engine, but other
than that it is ignored.

://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html

let us know if there is something more than this that you need to
know.

webadept-ga

---

Clarification of Question by liferoothealing-ga on 08 Sep 2003 07:44 PDT

Hi webadept-ga,

(I should be careful on nomenclature. I am using URL forwarding from
my Domain name registration and service provider [Enom.com]. Is this
the same as "redirection" ?)

I suspected that redirection might be an issue.

However, if I have submitted the actual page
http://liferoothealing.homestead.com

then redirection should not be the issue, should it?

I note that this page actually resolves a couple of 
different ways:

http://liferoothealing.homestead.com/Index
http://liferoothealing.homestead.com/index~ns4.html
http://www.liferoot.com/liferoothealing

So, the question is then
1/ what is the actual URL that I should sumbit to Google so that
it will potentially index this page?
2/ is there anything in the page source that would interfere with
indexing?

Thanks!

Alan

---

Request for Question Clarification by webadept-ga on 09 Sep 2003 09:44 PDT

Hi again, 

Most of your questions are answered in the Google Web master area. 

://www.google.com/webmasters/facts.html

According to this link, you can submit all of them and it won't hurt
you.

As for what you can do to help, or what structures on your page may be
hurting you,

Your robots.txt looks like this

# HomesteadSpider allowed to crawl everywhere
User-agent: HomesteadSpider
Disallow: 

# Other bots blocked from the core Homestead site
User-agent: *
Disallow: /~site/Scripts_ElementMailer
Disallow: /~site/Scripts_ExternalRedirect
Disallow: /~site/Scripts_HitCounter
Disallow: /~site/Scripts_NewGuest
Disallow: /~site/Scripts_RealTracker
Disallow: /~site/Scripts_Track
Disallow: /~site/Scripts_WebPoll

I would take out the blank Disallow line. It is meaningless really and
may be misinterpreted.

Basically your whole site is a shopping cart, which for the most part
is not a very high ranking website type. Not to say that sites of this
type can not rank high, it just takes quite a bit of work to get them
noticeable.

I would start with reading everything in the webmaster area on google,
and then go over to this site
http://www.searchengineworld.com/spiders/google_faq.htm

and do some reading in there. Once you have a better understanding of
how things work and what is being tried, you can be more effective on
your own site.

You also might want to read some of the previous questions along these
lines here on Google Answers.

webadept-ga

---

Clarification of Question by liferoothealing-ga on 09 Sep 2003 16:50 PDT

Thanks.

I had confused google with some other engines that would 
reject or penalize multiple listing requests.

With regards to the robots.txt, this appears to be the same on other
homestead pages, including their own home page (www.homestead.com),
so I'll assume its ok, though I will ask them about it.

I agree that a shopping cart will not rank high, but I'm not trying to
rank *high* at this point - I'm just trying to get indexed *at all*.
I can find nothing in the various resources I have looked in, many of
which you mention (thanks), the give me a clue as to what has stopped
this from occuring.

For instance, if I search on "Carol Barber Life Root Healing",
the number one match is a site that put our information up for us 4
years
ago and has never changed it since. see
www.sunforcenatural.com/lr.html

The next site ranked is 
http://www.arthritis-pain.us/dir/organic_root_stimulator/index.shtml
which contains a link to the sunforcenatural site mentioned above.

If I search "within" these results, on the liferoot urls, they
don't turn up at all, indicating to me that they are simply not
indexed by google at all.

So the basic issue still stands - is there anything in the page itself
that would stop the site from getting read and/or indexed by Google?
I don't have much control over the source that homestead creates, but
I can insert html if anything obvious or advantageous is missing.

Thanks

liferoothealing-ga

Hi there,

First of all, here are the things that are not causing the problem:

HTML - all fine

robots.txt - provided by Homestead. Many other Homestead sites are
indexed by Google okay, and all have the same robots.txt.

Re-direct - in itself not the problem, Google indexes sites as the URL
where they end up.

Content - the content is not a duplicate of anywhere else.

I presume that you haven't previously done anything to upset Google,
like automated rank checking, link farming, cloaking... (you would
know what these are if you had done them).


The Problem
-----------
Google is indexing the web non-stop, but there is a limit to how many
pages it can index properly, and somehow Google needs to choose which
pages to index, and which to pass on.

Google (being a gigantic piece of software - no human intervention)
has decided that your site is not worth indexing. This is purely due
to two factors:

- you are using a Homestead URL 
- no other site is linking to yours

Google say:

"Although we index more than 3 billion web pages, we cannot guarantee
that we will crawl all the pages on a particular site. However, we are
always working to increase the number of pages we crawl and hope to
include more pages in our index soon."
://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html#A1

"We DO NOT add all submitted URLs to our index, and cannot predict
when or if they will appear."
://www.google.com/webmasters/1.html

The result of this search is evidence of Google visiting your site,
taking note of the URL, but not indexing any content yet.

"liferoothealing.homestead.com"
://www.google.com/search?c2coff=1&q=%22liferoothealing.homestead.com%22

There would be a snippet of text listed for each page if Google had
indexed them.

AlltheWeb (the next best search engine after Google) has been less
fussy in indexing Homestead hosted sites:

Google returns 15,900 Homestead results, when searching for "hello"
://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=site%3A%2Ehomestead%2Ecom+hello

AlltheWeb returns 69,000
http://www.alltheweb.com/search?advanced=1&cat=web&cs=utf-8&jsact=&_stype=norm&type=all&q=hello&_b_query=&l=pref&ics=utf-8&cs=utf-8&wf%5Bn%5D=3&wf%5B0%5D%5Br%5D=%2B&wf%5B0%5D%5Bq%5D=&wf%5B0%5D%5Bw%5D=link.all%3A&wf%5B1%5D%5Br%5D=-&wf%5B1%5D%5Bq%5D=&wf%5B1%5D%5Bw%5D=&wf%5B2%5D%5Br%5D=&wf%5B2%5D%5Bq%5D=&wf%5B2%5D%5Bw%5D=&dincl=.homestead.com&dexcl=&geo=&limip=&embed%5Bjsc%5D=i&doctype=&dfr%5Bd%5D=1&
fr%5Bm%5D=1&dfr%5By%5D=1980&dto%5Bd%5D=18&dto%5Bm%5D=3&dto%5By%5D=2003&size%5Bp%5D=%3D&size%5Bv%5D=&size%5Bx%5D=0&hits=100&nooc=on


But why are other Homestead sites indexed?
------------------------------------------
If they don't have any incoming links, I can only guess that Google
has decided to only index X number of Homestead subdomains - some get
in, some miss out.



Solution 1. Pay to use www.liferoot.com 
---------------------------------------
Even if you did get indexed by Google, being hosted by Homestead with
the subdomain URL would make it difficult to rank highly in search
results. The reasoning is this - user subdomains are traditionally
associated with free hosting. If you are unwilling to pay a few
dollars a month for buying and hosting your own URL, then your site
can't be that important to you, and consequently probably not worth
indexing for anyone else to find.

Obviously your site is a nice one, and lots of people would like to
visit it. But the Google software doesn't know that. By paying extra
so that the you are using your own URL, and not re-directing to a
Homestead URL, Google will decide that it is worth indexing.

Hosting can be cheap. If you don't wish to pay for the Homestead
upgrade, I can recommend this $35 per year service:
http://www.bitshack.com/

It is also more impressive to use your own URL, and customers will
give your site more respect.


Solution 2 - Get some links
---------------------------
A single link from elsewhere will give Google condidence in the
quality of your site's content.

Avoid link exchange schemes (I'll link to you if you link to me), but
otherwise it doesn't matter - get some other sites to link to yours,
wait for Google to notice, and your site will be indexed. The higher
the quality of the sites linking to yours, and the more there are, the
better your site will rank in search results.

A great place to be linked from is this category in Open Directory:
http://dmoz.org/Shopping/Health/Beauty/Skin_Care/

Click on the link at the top of the page that says "suggest URL"


Submit again
------------
Keep submitting every month or so - it can't do any harm. When someone
links to your site, submit both URLs to Google. If and when you start
using your own URL without a redirect, submit.


Please note that this is not an official answer from Google - we here
at Google Answers are independent contractors and our answers come
from web research and personal experience. The only way to get an
official answer is by emailing help@google.com. They get a huge number
of webmaster queries, and I wouldn't hope for more than what already
appears in Google's Webmaster Guidelines.
://www.google.com/webmasters


Feel free to ask for a clarification if any part of my answer is
unclear or needs expanding upon.


Best wishes,
robertskelton-ga

Great answer thanks. I had come to most of these conclusions in the
last 48 hours (ie. have URL hosted by google, get some links back to
the site), but you've pulled this together nicely and confirmed that
all else is (hopefully) ok.

Thanks much!