Questions on SEO and engine to engine comparison

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  • SEO
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So let me preface by saying I may edit this post in time and that the 1st link in my signature is the site I am referring to - the 2nd is there to build a presence(which in time with undergo a 301 redirect) .

So the good news is I rank top 1-8ish in yahoo and bing for the service site of my company and did so in probably 7 days - which was AWESOME. The bad news is google is not updating my cache or URLs and its been longer than what yahoo and bing took to do. Google obviously is the big gun and I am concerned my 404 errors(from deleted URLS) and the slowness will hurt my ranking.

I really would like google to focus on the index.html(at least to update it) to start on when someone searches for our services(or detailing and finds ours) but because google is SO slow to update or whatever reason it chooses not to crawl, it ends up on the service page. For reference I have only done super basic SEO meta and title etc for index, service and about us - so people get the general idea or visual idea of what we are about.

When i mess around with google, I sometimes find outdated URLS from the old design which return a 404 not found - I am assuming that when google crawls again(last time on the 28th of January) they will find that these pages don't exist and erase from their index/cache - is this incorrect?

I would really like to see us on page 1 in a month or less, I am building back links but i have absolutely no idea why google would not update my index(which is still a terribly eyesore type design) but has updated and cached my new urls.

Whats the deal with this? I am trying to understand all of this but am still at a loss

Here is 1 example when i find what google shows me and click the cached it comes back with:

"Your search - cache:qTWNqZ8l-JIJ:detailwny.com/services.html auto detailing amherst ny - did not match any documents. ".

Thanks very much in advance for any and all help.
#comparison #engine #questions #seo
  • Profile picture of the author raviv
    Hi Mike,
    When I put in your domain name (the first link in your sig) within quotes on Google, it shows 5 backlinks including this post on WF

    A site:yourdomainname.com says - did not match any documents.

    You mentioned old designs of this site coming up that lead to 404 errors. I am not sure what you are saying here. I assume you had an older site at this domain which you have since deleted and you have built this current site on it.

    You could have done well by doing a 301 redirect from the old site to the current one on detailnwydotcom. It would have been much easier.

    Also, I tried to see if you have a robots.txt file with a block on it. There is none there. I think it is fine then.

    Since Google can see the backlinks, I am sure it will index the new site pretty soon.
    Best
    Raviv
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    • Profile picture of the author SFIMike
      I really appreciate it Raviv.

      Sorry for not being clear enough. What I meant by the 404 or "not found" errors is sometimes google will show a link to my site(an older url), I will click it or even sometimes click cached and it will tell me it does not exist.. thats really confusing.

      Hopefully this help too but when you say I could do a 301 redirect, I kept the same base url (detailwnydotcom) so it is simply not updating all of the site eventhough every single bit of contect in every page page changed(along with a few urls)

      The last time the index was cached was Jan 28, 2011 01:01:28 GMT everything was updated on the 29th, and since then only certain pages have been updated - I don't understand this.
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      • Profile picture of the author raviv
        Hey Mike
        Some good news

        If you type site:Buffalo and Amherst NY auto detailing by Auto Aesthetica in Google, I can see 17 pages from your site in the Google index. All the cached pages are working fine and the latest cache date is 28 Jan.

        Just do the usual promotion of your site and you should be seeing better results.
        Best
        Raviv
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        • Profile picture of the author SFIMike
          !!! that is good

          Will I just have to wait longer for the cache differences until its crawled again?

          I know the index will show up better in results however when I click the cached results for the very first link when you type the url in google, it shows the cached image as the older darker format(terribly sore on the eyes). Is this merely a waiting issue?

          Also(and sorry for the smaller questions), I noticed you said all the cached pages are working - Depending on what I enter into google, some of the results that show up are cached pages that no longer exist, how should I deal with them. For example, the site(in the dark format) used to have an ExpressServices.html and that still shows up however doesn't exist.

          I really hope some of it gets crawled soon, I am really happy with everything so far. And really appreciate the help.

          Actually Raviv, would you suggest I make a robots.txt? I was thinking of an allow all but I am new to their concept as well.
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          • Profile picture of the author raviv
            Hi Mike
            Just try the following steps:
            1) You would have done this already. SUbmit a sitemap to your Google Webmasters account
            2) Check out the active local directories in your locale and submit your site to them so the bots can find links to your site and follow them.

            3) Search for Website Indexer in Google. Submit your site through that. It submits your site to all the website evaluation sites (such sites put a $ value on your site). It is a good way to get the attention of all the search engine bots.

            If you do not have a robots.txt file on your web server, it means the spiders can crawl your site by default. It is a good practice though to have a robots.txt file.

            Use Notepad to create it.
            User-agent: *
            Allow: /

            Save it as robots (.txt will be automatically appended by Notepad) and then upload it to your root folder on your server

            Do not worry about the cache. The one you mention for ExpressMenu.html - I clicked the cache page and the bots last visited it on Nov 24, 2010. Do not stress on the cached pages. Google will update it over time when it visits that page next time.

            Everything should be fine at the rate at which it is going.

            Whatever you do, go to Google Webmasters and open an account for your site. It is very vital to see how Google is crawling and indexing your site and to find out if there are crawling issues. Glad to be of help

            Best
            Raviv
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  • Profile picture of the author hath80
    You could have done well by doing a 301 redirect from the old site to the current one on detailnwydotcom. It would have been much easier.
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    • Profile picture of the author SFIMike
      Originally Posted by hath80 View Post

      You could have done well by doing a 301 redirect from the old site to the current one on detailnwydotcom. It would have been much easier.
      301 redirect the site's old url(the page that doesnt exist any longer) back to itself(the update)? ?

      Again I am quite new but I really want the old URLs to disappear off the cache. Would just letting google update it when they do be an appropriate solution for this?


      Raviv, I had done all the things you list before you listed, I do appreciate it very much though!
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