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Has this ever happened to you???

by Eleanor
6 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hi there,

I apologise if this is in the wrong part of the forum... but it is SEO/Google related so it was my best guess.

Basically, about a year and a half ago, I bought a domain name and was planning on using a wordpress blog for the website. However, due to me getting distracted and moving on to other things, I ended up changing my plans and deleted the blog and left the domain empty.... or so I thought.

I recently started up the project again (2 weeks ago) and noticed that the domain had been given a PR 2 and had the remains of a wordpress blog on it.... just the wp-content folder and the cache directory.

The page was completely blank except for saying "Parent Directory" and then the "wp-content" folders etc were clickable links which led to blank pages.

I decided to "Google" my domain name and it appears to have been indexed as an IP address rather than the domain name. Basically, the listing in Google is as follows....

Index of/
Index of /. Parent Directory · wp-content.
209.240.155.87/ - cached

This is what appears when I Googled my domain name in quotes before I set up the new website.

However, I have now uploaded a new website with content (a static website of about 17 pages).

The problem I have is that Google appears to have indexed both the IP address page as well as my new website.

I fear that it's having an effect on my Google rankings because the real website is listed second when I Google my domain name now. The site has been live for about 2 weeks and usually I would be experiencing some form of rankings for my chosen keywords by now but .... nothing - not in the top 200. I'm not a newbie at Internet Marketing so I'm pretty sure that my website would normally be ranking if it weren't for this confusion that seems to have happened....

Has this ever happened to anyone before? Does anyone know of anything I can do to fix this?

Thanks in advance and feel free to ask more questions because I probably haven't been very clear!! Sorry!

Eleanor
#happened
  • Profile picture of the author Matt Morgan
    Originally Posted by bubbins1987 View Post

    Hi there,

    I apologise if this is in the wrong part of the forum... but it is SEO/Google related so it was my best guess.

    Basically, about a year and a half ago, I bought a domain name and was planning on using a wordpress blog for the website. However, due to me getting distracted and moving on to other things, I ended up changing my plans and deleted the blog and left the domain empty.... or so I thought.

    I recently started up the project again (2 weeks ago) and noticed that the domain had been given a PR 2 and had the remains of a wordpress blog on it.... just the wp-content folder and the cache directory.

    The page was completely blank except for saying "Parent Directory" and then the "wp-content" folders etc were clickable links which led to blank pages.

    I decided to "Google" my domain name and it appears to have been indexed as an IP address rather than the domain name. Basically, the listing in Google is as follows....

    Index of/
    Index of /. Parent Directory · wp-content.
    209.240.155.87/ - cached

    This is what appears when I Googled my domain name in quotes before I set up the new website.

    However, I have now uploaded a new website with content (a static website of about 17 pages).

    The problem I have is that Google appears to have indexed both the IP address page as well as my new website.

    I fear that it's having an effect on my Google rankings because the real website is listed second when I Google my domain name now. The site has been live for about 2 weeks and usually I would be experiencing some form of rankings for my chosen keywords by now but .... nothing - not in the top 200. I'm not a newbie at Internet Marketing so I'm pretty sure that my website would normally be ranking if it weren't for this confusion that seems to have happened....

    Has this ever happened to anyone before? Does anyone know of anything I can do to fix this?

    Thanks in advance and feel free to ask more questions because I probably haven't been very clear!! Sorry!

    Eleanor
    You have been very clear and precise and those sorts of questions do tend to get pin point answers.

    Google can take time to 'settle' rankings and they can fluctuate up and down for a while.

    When you said you would usually see rankings, have you got any links to your homepage, in the past or now? or not really? You can boost your rankings gradually with link building from a variety of sources from press releases, article directories, directory sites, purchased high PR links etc.

    It has just been 2 weeks, so i wouldn't fear anything right now.
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  • Profile picture of the author InternetMarketingIQ
    Join Google Webmaster and set things up how you want them. Ping your new content as you create it. Google will drop the offending content eventually.
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  • Profile picture of the author createdevelop
    Firstly, give it time. Google can take up to a few months to work out how things work on individual websites.

    Second, make sure you use google's webmaster tools. They are great for submitting sitemaps etc.

    Lastly make sure you are properly using the canonical tag, a htaccess file and a robots.txt file as this will ensure that your website is not being penalised for the reasons you listed.
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  • Profile picture of the author Fraggler
    Set your preferred URL in Webmaster tools to the domainname.com and maybe redirect the IP address to the domain name too if it isn't redirecting already...

    Make sure you test it though.

    RewriteEngine on
    RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} =123.456.789.012
    RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
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  • Profile picture of the author Aira Bongco
    Give it time. Google still has the old version of your website indexed. You can ping it to inform it of the change that you made and if you continue building backlinks, they will notice the change. Do not worry too much about it.
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  • Profile picture of the author stevemack
    Google has our old version in the database that has last cached our site. In your new domain if you have posted content then ping it once so that it can also help other search engines to crawl new pages and if you can start building links, it would give more weight age to your website. Don't worry about redirections and other stuff.
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