Web Design and SEO News and Tips

Why Isn’t My Site Showing Up in Google?

• February 26th, 2007

If your site isn’t showing up in Google’s search results, I’m going to help you find out why and tell you what to do about it.

First of all, though, let’s find out for sure whether or not your site is in Google’s index. If your site doesn’t come up when you type in your company name or your site’s topic it may be that your site just doesn’t rank well for the words you typed in. To find out for sure whether your site is in Google, run this simple test. Type the following into Google’s search box: site:www.mysite.com, replacing mysite.com with your site’s domain name. Also try this without the www. If Google knows about your site, it will return a list of all pages from your site that it has indexed. If no results are returned, your site is not in Google’s index. This blog post is for you!

Possible reasons why your site isn’t in Google:

1. Google simply hasn’t found your site yet. There are two main ways that Google finds out about your web site: you submit your site to Google, or Google finds your site from an incoming link on someone else’s site. To get your site quickly into Google’s index, the best way is to have someone link to your site from a page that you know is being indexed regularly by Google’s spider, googlebot. On it’s next spidering trip, googlebot will follow the link to your site and start exploring and indexing your pages. If you don’t know of anyone who can give you such a link, just submit your site to Google using a Google Sitemap.

2. Google has banned your site. There are a number of reasons why Google sometimes bans sites from its index. The main reason is that it considers your site to be “spamming” its index. If you know that your site has previously been listed by Google but has disappeared from their index, it could be that your site has been banned. If this has happened, contact Google to find out if and why your site has been banned, correct the problem, and wait for Google to re-index your site. Alternatively, you could start your site from scratch on a new domain name and submit/link to your new site to get it indexed. The disadvantage of the latter method is that Google favors older domains and your new site could get sandboxed for anything up to two years.

3. A third possible reason for your site not being in Google’s index is that Google’s spider is having technical problems indexing your site. It may be that it can get no further than the home page. Make sure you are using text links (rather than Javascript or Flash) so that googlebot can easily move through your site.

EFM Web Site Gets Facelift

• February 3rd, 2007

A few weeks ago I began a re-design of the Evangelistic Faith Missions web site. It was originally designed to fit nicely on smaller monitors (640 x 480). It was also created using a table structure with little regard for CSS. The re-design extends the width of the site to make it viewable on monitors that are 800 pixels wide or larger and focuses mainly on being lightweight and standards compliant. All pages validate to XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

Some new features have been added to the site. Visitors can now listen to the Missionary and Evangelistic Broadcast online. They can also subscribe to a podcast of the broadcast. Online donations are possible through Paypal and the Missionary Herald can also now be downloaded for offline reading or can be read online. A blog has also been set up so that EFM missionaries and staff all around the world can log in and give updates on their work, though this feature has not yet gone live.

Take a look at the new EFM website.