[DScuffle]

I am trying to register a site with google and despite doing everything they have said and submitting it to them I cannot seem to get them to search it.  Has anyone else had a problem with this.

Bubba, do you mind if I put a link on here so that their googlebot might find it?

[Bubba]

It depends what your site is

Search engines are weird - I put a few keywords (now out of date, must fix) on the front page of ukb, there's no meta info in the forum pages, but it's slowly crept up the google ranks until it's now on the first page of results if you type in "bouldering".

I never submitted to any search engines at all.  I think it's just down to links/traffic/etc - fuck knows, it seems to be a bit of a black art really.

[DScuffle]

It shouldn't offend anyone. I'll put the link on and you can delete it if you don't want it there.

TownShopping

I have put on a flat html sitemap and submitted that to them, but they haven't visited the page, I am starting to wonder whether the hosting company is blocking their spider.  Wierd!

[Bubba]

It took a couple of years for ukb to get high in the rankings.

Do you access to your server logs? If so you can check IPs for googlebots...

[dobbin]

well, there are whole shiny consultant types that can assist you with just such a piece of work, as well as lightening your pocket substantially to boot.

Originally search engines spidered web pages for Meta data, key words and stuff held in a tab somewhere on the page. Administrators could simply repeat the search string to increase a pages rank - for instance, if someone was searching for hot donkey pr0n and your site said that phrase three times in the meta data, then your page ranking would be higher than someone on www.hotdonkeypr0n.com who had only used it once, and so this meant that whily webmaster types artificially bumped people up the list of results from the search.

With people trusting the search engines to find them the best result to their query so the pressure to appear higher up the listings increased and people paid more attention to things like the meta data. Then along came google. Google was free of advertising and boasted that it wanted to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" and this was largely because they stomped on those page spiders and replaced them with the pagerank system. Page rank rates a site based on links to it in other places.... e.g. Freakclimbing.com has a link to here, this helps UKB's rating. Because someone else created the link to this site then they must like this site, and a site that has a lot of other sites linking it (incoming links) must be a good one because people want to go there. This is deemed to be a much better measure of whether a page is useful or not.

[DScuffle]

Aha, that's why they get cross when people try to dupe it by putting cyclical and repeating links in I suppose.

It'll be interesting to see if and when it picks it up now that it has at least 1 site with a link to it.  I have submitted it several times, and different pages of it. But google doesn't even know about it yet.

I have tried to get hold of my server logs, but it would appear to be a black art with my hosting company, I have enabled it, but they haven't told me the ftp site to pick it up from.  I'll get onto them and look!

[DScuffle]

Interestingly (if your into this kind of thing) I have tracked down the log's and there is no mention of google in them.  I presume the googlebot leaves an entry that contains google in it???

Either manual registration does nothing, or my host is blocking it.....Curious!

[Bubba]

I'm not entirely sure whether googlebot will always appear in the host name, I only know about the bots myself coz I've checked up on what at first seems like an alarming number of guests hitting the site at once.

I'll be honest, I know jack shit about search engine placement, I guess I've just got lucky on ukb.

I really should sort out an interim links page until the site is overhauled....which is actually finally in progress, when I get any time to spend on it.