Greetings all. Just signed up. I have a couple of 'quick' queries I really hope someone can answer.
I created a new website - www.artgraphica.net - which I registered with google two or three weeks ago. From my logs, the googlebots are taking a peek at my robots.txt and my index page, but then disappear. I have a page ranking of zero. I have a number of sites pointing to mine with PR of 3 or 4 on average, so will I have to be patient waiting for something to come along and deep crawl? In contrast MSN has been very quick to look through all my pages.

My other query is that my page content is largely duplicated through a flash enhanced version of the website that people can visit via a link in the main menu. I also intend to include downloadable PDF's pretty much duplicating my online tutorials. Is there a danger someone like google could look at this and consider it spam because the information is there twice? If this is the case would adding a 'disallow' for this flash folder in my robots.txt stop the bots going here and therefore solve a potential problem?

Thanks in advance!!

About links and PR - you don't need to wait, you need to work further on getting links. In general - yes, results are not so fast in Google. He doesn't like to index sites with PR0.

About flash - this is in general not very good idea - to duplicate info. In all terms - navigation, usability, site support.
In terms of Google - some pages layouts are different, so there will not be a big problem. Some - are similar, sooner or later google can glue them. Besides, frames are not the best variant.

You need to think about your site structure more seriously, if you want to create usefull site with future.
In terms of content - my congratulations! Very nice looking.

Hi Pavel, thank you for taken the time to reply!

I'm still working on gaining more links - I strive to get a couple more each day.

I've kept my mainsite hopefully 'search engine friendly', by stripping out scripts, linking to external style sheets, not using frames and putting my navigation table on the right of the screen so the html content and text is closer to the top of the coding. I don't mind if the search engines don't crawl the framed flash enhanced version, but I am concerned it would be considered spam. I spent a while putting it together so I'd rather not delete it, and I'd also rather not make the section 100% flash, although that would remove the duplication problem. I'll have to go away and put my thinking cap on!

In terms of content - my congratulations! Very nice looking.

Thank you!!

I don't see why you would be penalised personally. The flash site technically does have different content (different coding etc) so isn't a straight duplicate.

There are many sites out there which offer alternative versions (e.g. 'text only') and also there's the sites produced with programs such as Traffic Hurricane and the like, which can churn out hundreds of very similar pages, that don't get penalised!

I'm sure you don't need to worry, but if you want to double check you could always drop an email to help@google.com ... they are very resposive

Hi Marc. I'm sure you are right and I am just being paranoid!
I'll drop google a quick note, just in case. Thanks again!!

If you really wanted to be careful, you could make a different directory for the flash content and then change your robots.txt to tell the spiders not to look in that directory.

Thank you. I've already done this, though according to the logs MSN bot has still been trawling through the folder - I'm pretty sure my robots.txt is correct:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /logfiles/
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /cgibin/
Disallow: /html/flash/


?

Duplicate sites are supposed to be a no-no. Can someone tell me how that differs with a mirror site, which some pretty heavy companys use without penalty.

yeah, i'm not sure if i really understand what duplicate content is referred to as...maybe i'll start a new thread