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Google is constantly crawling the web. When I search "next google index" in Google in quotes, this post is the second result on Google right now. They do tend to crawl different sites at different rates, however. They crawl CNN a lot more often than they crawl the local RC airplane site that updates every three months, for example.
If you take a peek at Rand's twitter stream, you'll see that yesterday was a rather eventful day for him and it make take a few days before he has a few days to come into Q&A.
I've removed the link, as it has nothing to do with the question.
Google's JohnMu confirmed that they ignore links from UpDowner. Barry Schwartz writes about it on Search Engine Roundtable at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-updowner-ignored-15369.html
There's also a blog post about how to handle expired content at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content
You can ask your question in our private Q&A section. The questions are not indexed, and are not visible to anyone but SEOmoz staff and Associates, and we're under NDA to not reveal the contents of the questions.
Have you checked to make sure your analytics is installed correctly and functioning? I do see 20 pages indexed in Google for your site, and it's ranking for at least your domain name. I'd think you'd get at least one visitor from Google searching for your domain name in the past few months, if nothing else.
We had a great post about that a few months ago at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos that should help you out!
You can do an on-demand crawl test of up to 3000 URLs at http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test, which might help.
Keep in mind that the people who approve guest blogs may not accept a post that starts out with "While I was sitting in my payday loan shop in Los Angeles I got to thinking about how wallpaper influences the mood of a living room". However you write your post, you want to do it so that it makes sense in the context of the post and doesn't scream "hey, I wrote this post solely to get a link".
Rand also wrote a great post a while back about what to do when the wrong page is ranking.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions
There was a YouMoz post last year at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-win-tweets-and-influence-search-engines-with-paywithatweet that explored using PWAT.
When Roger crawls, he looks for similarity in code as well as the content a user sees. If you have an ecommerce site that sells apples and oranges, but only has two sentences describing each, and 95% of the code between the two pages is the same, Roger's going to say those pages look alike to him, even if they look different to a user.
Not a direct answer, but an extension for Firefox that I love called Resurrect Pages (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/resurrect-pages/) lets you click on a link, or right click on a page, and get the Google cache, look up the page on the Internet Archive, and go to a few other cache locations.
This post by the help desk about why a full crawl isn't being done may also be helpful.
Thanks everyone! I'll forward this to my brother and see if that does the trick (then come back and mark helpful answers).
Keri
I'm hoping that to someone experienced this is a quick fix, but it may be a pain and a rat's nest of code.
Five or so years ago, I designed my brother's website at https://www.argentdata.com/index.html. I built it off of the Mollio theme (http://www.mollio.org/), and used templates in Dreamweaver, so it's not in a CMS. It's not a work of art, and there are some issues with it, but it's served him fairly well. Longer-term it needs a redesign, but right now I'm asking about just one aspect of the existing design.
There are two parts to the site - the plain HTML site, and the osCommerce store that's under the purchase tab. If you go to http://www.argentdata.com/catalog/ you'll see that the osCommerce store is full width, while the navigation header copied over from the main site is 1200 pixels wide and centered. If you're on a wide monitor, it looks weird.
What he'd like to do:
Make the main site align to the left, both the content and navigation, and make the navigation left aligned for the osCommerce portion. He figures this is the easier way to do things, rather than try to muck with osCommerce CSS (that also has some merged CSS from the Mollio theme) and get it to center.
Does anyone have a fairly simple solution that can make the navigation bar look good on osCommerce? Either the above of making everything left aligned, or some other solution simple we haven't thought of?
Thanks!
Implications I'd be concerned about are losing communication with Google.
Without GWT, you're losing knowing about any warnings or penalties associated with the site.
Without GWT, you're losing the ability to tell Google about your parameters in your site, your preferred crawl rate, etc.
Without sitemaps, you're losing the ability to tell Google about the pages in your site that they might not easily discover. You're also doing the same for Bing if you don't put up any site maps.
Google will still get a lot of information from people surfing that have the Google Toolbar installed.
You can get some of this same information with the Bing Webmaster Center, SEOmoz tools, and other tools.
If you're paranoid but would still like the information, I'd set up separate Google accounts for each of your sites and keep everything separate.
Have any other warnings besides the too many on-page links gone up? That page has over 270 links. Each tweet has 3-4 links, plus the directory at the bottom with 26 links, etc.
Visually, it looks nice. I'm going to ask someone else on the SEO aspect of things, but my initial thought is that I wouldn't worry an excessive amount if it's really only the too many links on the page errors that have increased.
Hi Joel,
That's an interesting nugget about Bing taking into consideration the code being used for the site, especially in relation to older versions of IE. Would you be able to share where you heard that information so we can get a little more background?
I'm more familiar with Microsoft trying to get people away from using older versions of IE, such as this page from Microsoft with "Death to IE6" in the title tag. http://www.ie6countdown.com/
For knowing what's good advice, I'd start out by reading our recently updated Beginner's Guide to SEO. That should help you get started without even needing to hire someone just yet.
Hi Jason,
Thanks for being so considerate! You're welcome to discuss the sites here. It will help in the discussion if you indicate they're adult sites (as that helps us know that it's a real competitive industry, I'd ask the same if someone was talking about payday loans as opposed to garden rakes). If you do include a link, please add a note that it's NSFW. We do have many people in the forum who are surfing from work, and they appreciate that type of warning before blindly going to a site.
Thanks!
Also don't forget to do the same on Bing! This is one time where it's handy that they seem to be a bit slower in updating things, though they also don't crawl as deeply. If it's an older site and you don't change it too often, the Wayback machine at web.archive.org may also help you out.
Hey everyone,
We're so sorry, but this is a known bug on our end. It's on our fix list, but we don't have an ETA for the fix right now.
The most common reasons for this are discussed at https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/409821-why-isn-t-my-site-being-crawled-you-re-not-crawling-all-my-pages. If those don't solve your problem, email help@seomoz.org and we'll be able to sort it out at the help desk.
Thanks!
Actually, please email editor@seomoz.org. I am the primary person who manages YouMoz, but there are actually several of us who current work on YouMoz and this will ensure that the entire team sees the request.
Hi Dan (and anyone else with the same question),
You can put html code in your blog bio section of your profile. When you make new posts, the html will show up in the post, even though in your profile it doesn't show. We do ask that these links not be abused.
For existing posts, we need to re-save the post so that it grabs the blog bio information again, and then it will show up. Send an email to editor@seomoz.org and we can take care of that for you next week.
One of the answers on this thread may help you too. http://www.seomoz.org/q/has-anyone-used-facebook-to-promote-their-website
One month is still quite new for a domain. I'm going to http://dogtraining.blogspot.com/ but not finding any content on that page and wondering what I'm missing, and how that would get 500 backlinks. If the page truly has no content and it has 500 backlinks, I'd be worried about those links not being of the very natural type.
Hi Dave,
That report is looking at internal links to just that page, though it does seem like there should be more. Could you email help@seomoz.org? They'll be able to take a closer look at it and help explain the numbers and document if there's a problem.
Hi Dave,
I went to OSE and put in that URL and selected all links from internal pages to pages on this root domain and I'm seeing several hundred links show up. Maybe double-check some of the settings you're using?
You wouldn't set up reciprocal links, but instead find ways to get more valuable one-way links. The links section of the blog is a good place to look for ideas on getting good links.
You'll want to verify your site in Google Webmaster Tools, then look for any messages in there from Google that might alert you to any problems they've found with your site.
Has your traffic changed? Have your rankings changed?
I'm downloading the manuals for CMS made Easy right now, but they're taking a bit of time to download. If you use the FTP login information you have to make an FTP connection to your site, you should be able to see (you may have to enable viewing of hidden files) a file called .htaccess (yes, there's a period in front of the file). You can download that to your computer, open it in a text editor (like notepad), make the edits that eyepaq mentions, then upload it again. I'd first make a copy of the file in case you screw something up.
When the manuals download, I'll look through them to see if there's a setting within their program that makes this easier for you.
Does traffic make your client money, or do conversions make your client money? Are the people doing what you want them to once they get on the site? Optimizing for conversions may be the next thing to focus on -- make use of that traffic you're already getting.
Howdy!
I understand that some of this stuff can sound like gibberish if you don't understand what's going on. If you can tell us your site's URL that would help us out. If not, can you let us know if you're using something like Wordpress or Joomla? We can tailor our advice to you a bit better if we know more about your site. Just like it's easier to give instructions about changing your oil if we know what kind of car you have and we can tell you exactly what to look for, rather than giving more general information.
Keri
That may not be the proper use of the canonical tag. You generally don't want to do a rel canonical on everything to your home page. I've asked Dr. Pete to step in and add some advice, as he's the expert in that tag.
Google wrote a post about this at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/06/find-out-what-people-are-searching-for.html.