My site is 1 month old and this is the only thing that shows up in the idex
˙ţ< ! D O C T Y P E H T M L P U B L I C " - / / W 3 C / / D T D ... - 8 visits - May 16

˙ţ< ! D O C T Y P E H T M L P U B L I C " - / / W 3 C / / D T D H T M L 4 . 0 T r a n s i t i o n a l / / E N " > < H T M L > < H E A D > < T I T L E ...
www.gatormaniacs.com/ - 163k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this


Is this normal or have I done something wrong?

Thanks

You have a fault on first indexing.You have spaces and fauls on code.But now, it seems ok.It will be normal on other indexing, only wait.Have a nice time

Usually this is caused by the CMS you are using, putting "rogue" characters at the very start of the page, before the doctype.

Was your original template designed in Word or another wordprocessor ?

im not sure as I purchased the template.

If you purchased an HTML template and edited it with some software ( Dreamweaver, FrontPage, Notepad, etc ) to create your site ... then go into the htm files with Notepad and delete that first character or two before <doctype.

I'm a little surprised that would cause a crawl error; I think most browsers would just show the character at the start of the page before all the content. But technically html isn't valid without a doctype, so maybe Google really is a stickler for proper code after all?

It's not to do with valid HTML but with the unicode characters that wordprocessing software adds to documents as formatting commands.

If you look at the cached version of the page you will see 2 or 3 odd characters, and it seems to be the case is that one, or a combination of these become a control code that the indexer responds to and creates double letter spacing which "breaks" the HTML tags.

I us trellian webpage pro to edit the template and when I open the template I do not seen those extra charaxcters that are seen when viewing the cache.