The Google Forum

**bs1** · 08-24-2006, 02:13 PM

Hello, all. Nice to meet you. For some reason it seems that Google isn't properly indexing my site - that's what I've heard - but Yahoo, Altavista, etc. are. Would someone mind taking a look at my meta tags at Pollyticks.com - Political Cartoons, Polls and Satire I can't figure out what the problem could be. I have a robots.txt file which other engines seem to be accessing, and I've manually submitted the URL to Google. If I search for pollyticks.com through Google it lists the site, so I don't know what that means. Any help would be appreciated. Much obliged, Blue

Here's what I get when I input pollyticks.com into statbrain.com:
Alexa traffic rank Visit Alexa Links according to Google 0 Visit Google Links according to Yahoo 1,180 Visit Yahoo Links according to Altavista 1,130 Visit AltaVista Links according to AllTheWeb 1,090 Visit AllTheWeb Server hosted in United States
Here are my meta tags:
<head>

<title>Pollyticks.com - Political Cartoons, Polls and Satire</title>

<meta name="author" content="Blue Steel"/>
<meta name="description" content="Political cartoons, polls, political news, editorials and satire. We spoof President Bush, Republicans, Democrats, Congress, Washington politics and more."/>
<meta name="robots" content="index,follow"/>
<meta name="keywords" content="republican,democrat,war,iraq,satire,presi dent,bush,political cartoons,cartoon,editorials,congress,senate,politi cal,us,polls"/>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
<meta name="ICBM" content="1.36 , 103.845"/>
<meta name="DC.title" content="Pollyticks.com"/>
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="xml-rss2.php"/>
<link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" title="RSD" href="rsd.php"/>
<link rel="icon" type="image/png" href="favicon.png"/>
<link rel="bookmark" title="Nucleus" href="http://nucleuscms.org/"/>
<link rel="archives" title="Archives" href="http://www.pollyticks.com/archives/1"/>
<link rel="top" title="Today" href="http://www.pollyticks.com/"/>
<link rel="up" href="http://www.pollyticks.com/blog/1" title="Today"/>

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="http://www.pollyticks.com/skins/plain10/screen.css"/>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="handheld" href="http://www.pollyticks.com/skins/plain10/handheld.css"/>
</head>

**chrishirst** · 08-24-2006, 03:33 PM

well as meta tags means little more than nothing and submitting to SEs will do nothing as well it must be something else.

how old is the site?

are your backlinks decent ones or simply a bunch of crappy link exchanges and poor quality directories?

**bs1** · 08-24-2006, 08:41 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrishirst

well as meta tags means little more than nothing and submitting to SEs will do nothing as well it must be something else.

how old is the site?

are your backlinks decent ones or simply a bunch of crappy link exchanges and poor quality directories?

The site went online around May 20th. Most of the backlinks are with sites getting fewer than 1,000 visits/day, but a couple are with sites getting between 3,000-5,000 visits/day - not huge but not miniscule either.

I haven't submitted it to any directories except the Open Directory, which I only submitted to yesterday.

Why would MSN, Yahoo and Altavista rank it but still Google's got it ranked at zilch? I get the feeling Google doesn't like me and would like to get on their good side.

**colochris** · 08-25-2006, 01:20 AM

I feel the exact same way. I have 923 indexed items with MSN, but only 3 with google.

i too think that google hates me

**gringo** · 08-25-2006, 04:37 AM

Google has indexed your site: site:http://www.pollyticks.com/ - Google Search

**chrishirst** · 08-25-2006, 05:25 AM

Quote:

Why would MSN, Yahoo and Altavista rank it but still Google's got it ranked at zilch? I get the feeling Google doesn't like me and would like to get on their good side.

Because Google is the only one with an aging delay
The number of visits doesn't matter for Google. It's how important the page is to the algo, and No, you can't find that out because you cannot see the things that make it important

The number of visitors TO THE PAGE YOUR LINK IS ON is important though from a getting qualified traffic POV.

The only thing that will help right now is patience, good optimising, patience, a useful link building campaign and did I mention patience?

By useful link building I don't mean posting in every link exchange forum or joining a link exchange scheme BTW.

**bs1** · 08-25-2006, 12:21 PM

I misspoke then. I know it's in Google's index, but I was referring to the number of links listed by statbrain and seorocks.com. Both of them show more than 1,000 links from MSN and Altavista but zero from Google. That's what I don't understand.

**bs1** · 08-25-2006, 12:23 PM

Thanks, chrishirst. Patience is tough to have, but I hear you. Also, should I be concerned if the html validator says my home page has more than 200 errors? I also checked a number of other URLs, many for huge sites, and saw that almost all of them also returned a lot of errors, so I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. What do you think?

**gringo** · 08-25-2006, 12:43 PM

It's a good thing to get your pages to validate, but it probably won't help them rank. As you have found, some top ranking pages do have errors.

**drhfinegifts** · 08-27-2006, 10:38 PM

1. Google ignores meta tags - page content is king with Google.
2. Relevant links are a must - note that I said RELEVANT!
3. Expect to wait a good 6 months to a year for your site to show up in the SERPs. This doesn't always happen, but in most cases there is an aging delay (or sandbox).
4. Submit to directories, submit press releases, and write articles. All of the search engines love these.
5. Do #4 over consistently (and slowly) and Google will respond!

**drhfinegifts** · 08-27-2006, 10:41 PM

Oh, I forgot to add: Google does not show all your backlinks. So don't be too concerned about your links.

Try just searching "www. domain. com" and see what pops up. Also try allinurl:www.domain.com to see what pages of yours are indexed.

**bs1** · 08-28-2006, 03:31 PM

drhfinegifts, I'm beginning to grasp the importance of patience when it comes to Google and site ranking. Patience and good content. Thanks for the help.

**ashoke** · 08-29-2006, 12:59 AM

Yea Brother. I was reading all these messages its "Great". Yea you need to have lots of patience with google, get your tags ready, Get quality related links with different IP and you are set. Brother someone rightly said dont go through backlinks as some site with less backlinks gets to the top all depends on the number of visitors and hits you re getting from different sites linking to you.

Great thanks to all.

With respect

Ashoke.

**vangogh** · 08-29-2006, 01:26 AM

bs1 if it's the amoutn of backlinks showing in the results that's the concern drfinegifts hit the nail on the head. Google never shows all the backlinks it knows about. They only show a small random sample. Google is not a good measure for how many backlinks you have.

If you try the link: search for google itself you'll see google shows about 1 million results. Seems pretty good until you try the same search at Yahoo which shows almost 172 million results. Google just won't show all the backlinks. I find the results from Yahoo to be the most accurate count of your backlinks, but the lower count at Google is nothing to be concerned about. Try any site and you'll see Google shows a lot less backlinks.

**thedrua** · 07:45 AM

The meta tags look good. Im no expert but I have a degree in Computer Science and Networking. I'll check some of my program books and get back to ya. i had the same problem with some of my websites especially my wholesale site. Vangough is right about the backlinks.

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