Hello again, Peter ~
I hope you didn't get the wrong impression about Google Answers
Researchers ... most researchers are very conscientious about ensuring
our customers are satisfied with their answers and work hard to make
sure you get the information you are seeking.
I hope you weren't inconvenienced too much by having to change servers
in order to accommodate using an .htaccess file, because
unfortunately, that's not the answer to your question, and probably
the least of the problems with your site.
==================
Your Question
==================
You are basically asking why, when you do a search for your domain
using the full domain name, www.6sigma.us, it merely returns:
6sigma.us ... with no 'www' and no description, etc.
First of all, when I answered your first question, I told you I did
not experience that. In fact, I quoted verbatim the return I was
getting. The explanation for that is simple ... Google has tens of
thousands of servers in a dozen or more data centers.
The results I see may not be the same results you see, because you are
being directed to a data center which hasn't been updated, or is
updated, and I'm looking at the results on a data center which hasn't
been updated.
Sometimes, you can repeat your search and see the different results
yourself, because your search was redirected to a different data
center. When you index over 6 billion pages, in that many locations,
it is physically impossible to update them all at one time.
As for 'why' this is happening, only Google knows, and they may not tell you.
The email you got from Google is pretty much the "canned" response
people get, a generic answer to a specific question, with directions
to pay attention to Google's Guidelines.
And still no answer to your question.
=================================
Yours Isn't the Only
Site Which Has Experienced This
=================================
While it is no small consolation, yours isn't the only site that
experienced this phenomenon.
In fact, since about mid-March, this has happened to hundreds of
sites, and there is a 32-page discussion of this happening on
Webmaster World's site. The discussion in the Google News section is
entitled "Big sites suffering no title / no snippet in SERPS
Is google penalizing big sites?", and can be found here:
- http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/22615.htm
There is a lot of speculation about why that is happening ... but that
is all it is, speculation.
There are a lot of "suggestions" about what to change, too. But if you
dig through that whole thread, and it *will* take some time, you will
find that the number of sites that came back after a period of time is
almost the same number of sites that made major changes and then got
their site back.
The one difference is that those sites which closely followed Google's
Guidelines, that is, they didn't engage in any of the practices known
to cause penalties or outright banning by Google.
Those who played it straight, stuck to the basics of relevant content,
good HTML and relevant links TO their sites ... came back after
another visit or two from the Google crawler. Those who were playing
games, such as spammy content, sneaking redirection, cloaked links,
link farms, duplicate content, etc.
If you take a look, too, at recent postings in Webmaster World's
Google News, Google has dropped hundreds or even of thousands of links
to sites ... and most of them are nothing but link farms, linking
schemes, spamming links and irrelevant links when the only purpose for
a link being there is to increase page rank.
At one time or another, all of these so-called search engine
optimization tricks worked - because some enterprising soul discovered
they 'helped' in SERPs ranking. And later on, they not only didn't
work, but those sites employing such tactics were relegated to the
bottom of the SERPs rankings or disappeared from Google's index
altogether.
Recently, it's the links which have disappeared, which I touched on in
my answer to your first question.
So, ignore all the speculation on the "why" this phenomenon happened,
and you're left with two options:
1. If your site is designed properly, you don't employ
tricks to try to increase your SERPs ranking, wait
it out. That strange URL with no description seems
to disappear with a correct listing after a visit or
two from Google's crawler.
Speculation there seems to be it's a place holder
until the Google crawler can index your pages and
distribute the results among all the data centers,
which bears out more than other speculation, and is
mentioned in Jill Whalen's Forum, which is far more
reliable a source than some of the answers in
Webmaster World.
or
2. If your site is using the so-called "black hat"
optimization techniques, it's time to clean up your
act and resubmit to Google with an apology.
Unfortunately, from some of the information I've found regarding your
site, www.6sigma.us, the latter is more probably the case.
========================
Observations About The
Results That You See
========================
There are a handful of search engine optimization experts who enjoy a
stellar reputation and whose advice regarding search engines, design,
etc., are really worth paying attention to. These experts work to
ensure every optimization meets or exceeds the recommendations by
Google and other major search engines for relevant content and
quality. These are names you might recognize, such as Danny Sullivan,
Andrew Goodman, Jill Whalen and others.
They do not employ or advocate the use of shortcuts designed to trick
search engines, knowing full well that while they may work today, and
even tomorrow, eventually they will hurt their clients far more than
it will ever help them. Penalty is a harsh word, but when your site
suddenly disappears into the very bowels of search engine results
because of such tactics, it's a long road back - especially if you
rely on traffic from Google for commerce!
I took the liberty of discussing your matter with Jill Whalen, who
gave me full permission to quote her, and this is what she said about
the search engine listing that you are seeing:
She first commented,
"Often this happens if the file is excluded via
robots.txt, or if the page happened to be down when
the Googlebot came around. The reason that those
others saw theirs straightened out after awhile was
probably just because the sites couldn't originally
be crawled, and then they were later crawled fine."
On a closer inspection, she changed her mind and stated definitively,
"It's a duplicate content problem, along with
possibly keyword stuffing and possibly ...
paid links."
I'll discuss those issues further in this Answer.
==============================
Some Real Problems
With Your Site As It Is Now
==============================
1. The Javascript
-------------------
There is a lot of Javascript which has errors and which doesn't
validate to the DOCTYPE Declaration you are using. This, however,
whether you move it outside your actual webpage and link to it or
leave it in your page, is not the major problem.
I ran your page through the W3C validator, and found that this is not
valid HTML markup and no less than 137 errors in the coding. You can
do the same by running it through the validator yourself, here:
- http://validator.w3.org/
Again, this is the least of your worries, but I am sure at some time
or another you'll want to ensure it is properly coded for your
visitors' ease of use. So that's a handy resource to use.
2. Using .htaccess
--------------------
With a very few exceptions, routers along the Internet as well as most
hosts rewrite search URLs so that a domain name typed in a browser
locator box, with or without the 'www' resolves to the correct
location.
On the local server level, your host usually has a mod rewrite so that
6sigma.us would resolve to the "correct" domain name, www.6sigma.us.
Therefore, unless you maintain your own servers for hosting your
domain, there really wouldn't be a reason for you to need the
.htaccess rewrite, and it really has nothing to do with what you are
experiencing in Google.
So this isn't an answer to your problem, either.
3. Duplicate Content
----------------------
Google warns about duplicate content in its content guidelines,
- ://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
and there is too much anecdotal examples of recent penalties for
duplicate content recently to ignore. What does this mean to you?
Simply that Google will compare and run the most relevant, relegating
the rest to much lower positions in rank on its SERPs.
Google does have pages of your site in its index with the www, but
only certain pages. Other pages are in the supplemental results, and
that's often because of duplication.
An allinurl search shows that G does know about lots of the pages:
- http://64.233.161.104/search?q=allinurl:6sigma.us&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&start=20&sa=N&filter=0
Grabbing some copy from your home page and plugging it into Google,
you'll see that it's duplicated from other sites:
- ://www.google.com/search?q=%22Doctor%27s+Offices,+to+City+Government++and+even+Six+Sigma+in+Nonprofits%22&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&filter=0
(with tracking codes / session ids), or
- ://www.google.com/search?q=%22providing+business+information+to+our+internal+and+external+customers%22&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&filter=0
At this time, original content - not found anywhere else - would be in
order. The other sites may be considered more relevant by Google for
any number of reasons, and yours may well be relegated to a much lower
SERPs rank accordingly.
4. Spamming
-------------
While it is always good to utilize keywords on each page, spamming the
pages with a lot of keywords has just the opposite effect.
There's a reason Google recommends designing your site for visitors
and asking yourself if what you've done would matter if you weren't
trying to gain a higher position in Google's SERPs for your search
terms,
- ://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
because, as Google says in "Reasons Your Site May Not Be Included",
"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. 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."
- ://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html
If you want to get an idea of what the Googlebot sees when it crawls
your page, Google recommends using the Lynx browser (a text browser),
to get a good idea.
If you don't wish to go to the trouble of downloading and installing
Lynx, you can get a close idea what it sees by using the Lynx viewer,
here:
- http://www.delorie.com/web/lynxview.html
I doubt any legitimate search engine optimizer would classify this
anything other than spamming. This is another issue you really should
address. Optimized to help is one thing, over-optimized to the point
where it looks spammy can hurt you.
5. Cloaking and Redirects
---------------------------
The domain six-sigma-training.net apparently redirects to your site.
That site is in Google's cache differently though. Take a look at
this:
- http://216.239.39.104/search?sourceid=navclient-menuext&q=cache:http%3A//www.six-sigma-training.net/
Yet when we click on the original page, it's redirected. It is hard
for me to detect exactly what is going on there, but if I can find it
by some digging, Google can find it by application of its algorithm,
and it isn't going to do you any good.
Your home page is also cached, but with a tracking link,
- http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:SLJywDzFqL0J:www.6sigma.us/%3Ftrackcode%3Dbizcom+%22%2Bwww.6sigma.us%22&hl=en
which is probably another reason you don't see the cache of your home
page under your normal URL.
Here's yet another link the redirected site points to:
- http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:6lfrBfvBW6QJ:www.afamilyplace.com/+&hl=en
all the sites in this directory are cloaked sites pointing to
DMOZ.ORG. There is a link to a search optimization service at the
bottom of that page, but no matter what you do, I wouldn't use them if
they're employing those tactics.
===========
Summary
===========
No one but Google knows why you are experiencing your problem, and at
the moment, they're not going to tell you.
I haven't encountered it myself, which is either because the data
center my search is directed to either hasn't picked it up yet, or it
has picked it up and already corrected it.
The reasons could also be:
1. The site wasn't available on the last crawl (your
web logs should show information on when you were
last crawled),
2. There *is* something wrong with your site, such as
over-optimization (spam), duplicate content, site
redirects, etc., as any or any combination of those
can cause a penalty.
My best "guesstimate" is that your site has enough wrong that it is
probably more than one thing. But again, that is a guess, not fact, as
Google Answers Researchers are not privy to any insider information,
including the specifics of Google's closely-guarded algorithms.
You can either:
1. Wait it out and see if it doesn't correct itself, as has
been the case with others experiencing the same problem;
or
2. Clean up the trouble spots, and I have identified several,
before you are penalized by Google. Then write to Google
apologize for any misdeeds and ask for reinclusion.
====================
My Recommendations
====================
I would recommend consulting with a known, legitimate search engine
optimization consultant. Take your pick of such names as Jill Whalen,
Danny Sullivan, Andrew Goodman, Shari Thorow, but stay completely away
from any so-called SEO who uses tactics such as spam, redirects,
cloaking, etc. Their tactics may work for a while, but ultimately,
they do more harm than good, and could possibly get you banned
permanently from Google.
Clean up your site.
Rewrite your site for original content. If other sites (possibly
affiliates, etc.) are copying your own, put a stop to it and insist
they write their own content and then link. A good Search Engine
Optimization consultant can also recommend ways to accommodate
affiliate links.
Don't even try to use any 'formula' for search terms to content, but
instead do what Google suggests, design your site for your visitor and
consider whether or not it makes sense to him. If you're too involved
to see the difference, test it before you launch the new material.
Dump the redirect/cloaking mentioned above. That will get you
penalized. If it can be found using Google's simple search techniques,
you can count on it being found by Google's sophisticated algorithms.
If you designed the site yourself, fix the problems in the Javascript.
If you used the services of a web designer, insist the designer clean
up the Javascript errors until your site can validate to W3C
standards. Like them or not, when you can validate to those standards,
the search engines, including the Googlebot, have no problem indexing
your site.
Dump your irrelevant links. While you cannot help who links to you, it
wouldn't hurt to develop relevant links to counteract any "paid" or
other links which look like the exist for no other reason than to
boost your Google SERPs rank. There are some links listed now, but
some of them are tenuous at best. There is too much evidence that
Google is cleaning out those types of links, so you need to make sure
you have links that are relevant to your site.
If your site is hosted, your host should have the rewrites for URL
resolution at the server's root level. If you maintain your own
server, make sure the rewrites are done correctly at that level, so
regardless of which URL (with or without the 'www'), it returns to
your site.
Then resubmit your site to Google or wait til more visits from the
Googlebot to see if it is automatically reinstated as it should be.
Remember, this can take as long as 8 weeks, and regaining lost ground
will probably NOT happen overnight. There are no shortcuts or quick
fixes, and there is no one answer to fix things.
Don't put too much store in the Google toolbar's PageRank number. It
is merely a number and there are too many relevant sites with few (if
any) links to their site, yet have content deemed so relevant as to be
almost authoritative at the top of the list to put a lot of store in
PageRank.
I do not wish to appear overly-critical here. Often, when answering
these types of questions, it is easy to pinpoint one particular reason
for a problem with a listing in Google's index. In your case, and
after some pretty easy searching, there were much more than any one
particular problem identified which *could* contribute to the problem
you are experiencing.
To identify one potential problem without identifying the others might
not clear up your problem, so a close look at practices employed and
which to fix is in order.
Although I cannot tell you exactly *why* you are experiencing this
problem, I think I have identified enough trouble spots to give you an
idea that at the moment, your site is not ideally designed or
situated.
I hope the above gave you some insight into both the potential
problems within your site and how easily they can be remediated in
order to deliver a site to your visitors that is friendly and really
relevant.
Best of luck,
Serenata
Google Answers Researcher |
