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Raven
Site Admin/Owner



Joined: Aug 27, 2002
Posts: 17088

PostPosted: Mon Sep 13, 2004 10:28 pm Reply with quote

Interesting. A few hours ago I only had 1 hit. Now there's 19! Google this Smile)

quality php scripts
 
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storebuilder
PHP-Portal Project



Joined: Mar 09, 2004
Posts: 169
Location: Telford UK

PostPosted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 6:24 am Reply with quote

This may not be the silver bullet but I think it goes a long way to solving the issue.

Google HAS to have some way of detecting the content in your page. This is why seo guys always build simple looking pages so that the content can be picked up easily amid all of the noise. It's usually defined by the <H1> tag as to where your story begins.

The default in nuke is to use "storytitle" as the class that defines the start of the news item and google knows this. It doesn't matter what it is as long as google recognises it.

You are missing a stylesheet, probably because whoever coded the theme didn't include one. And this has been the source of your woes.

I think that if you revert to using a theme with a standard nuke stylesheet or sort one out for this theme then it's going to solve the issue.

This would explain many things.

It would explain why all of your content listings in google are the same.
Why some of your listings have blank descriptions.
Why the posts have blank descriptions.
Why it's been a problem for a long time.
Why the disappearing googlebot has happened to others - without them realising that they changed a theme or skin without including a stylesheet.

If you read a news item and then view the source you can see that there is absolutely no way for a bot to tell where the story begins.

It makes complete sense of the situation.
 
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Raven







PostPosted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 6:34 am Reply with quote

Not sure I'm tracking with you here. My theme most definitely has a style sheet located in themes/mytheme/style/style.css . What makes you think I don't have a style sheet?
 
Raven







PostPosted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 6:37 am Reply with quote

Try using Sky-Blue and look at the source. Then use fiapple and look at the source. Do you see a difference? When the bot visits the site, I would assume that since it is not a registered member it gets the default theme in the Preferences section?
 
sixonetonoffun
Spouse Contemplates Divorce



Joined: Jan 02, 2003
Posts: 2496

PostPosted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 6:47 am Reply with quote

I think what he means is that the standard styles aren't being used in Sky Blue.
Code:


.title       {BACKGROUND: none; COLOR: #000000; FONT-SIZE: 13px; FONT-WEIGHT: bold; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Helvetica; TEXT-DECORATION: none}
.content    {BACKGROUND: none; COLOR: #000000; FONT-SIZE: 11px; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Helvetica}
.storytitle    {BACKGROUND: none; COLOR: #363636; FONT-SIZE: 14px; FONT-WEIGHT: bold; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Helvetica; TEXT-DECORATION: none}
.storycat   {BACKGROUND: none; COLOR: #000000; FONT-SIZE: 13px; FONT-WEIGHT: bold; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Helvetica; TEXT-DECORATION: underline}
.boxtitle    {BACKGROUND: none; COLOR: #363636; FONT-SIZE: 11px; FONT-WEIGHT: bold; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Helvetica; TEXT-DECORATION: none}
.boxcontent    {BACKGROUND: none; COLOR: #000000; FONT-SIZE: 12px; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Helvetica}
.option    {BACKGROUND: none; COLOR: #000000; FONT-SIZE: 13px; FONT-WEIGHT: bold; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Helvetica; TEXT-DECORATION: none}
.tiny      {BACKGROUND: none; COLOR: #000000; FONT-SIZE: 10px; FONT-WEIGHT: normal; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Helvetica; TEXT-DECORATION: none}
.footmsg        {BACKGROUND: none; COLOR: #000000; FONT-SIZE: 8px; FONT-WEIGHT: normal; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Helvetica; TEXT-DECORATION: none}
.footmsg_l   {BACKGROUND: none; COLOR: #000000; FONT-SIZE: 8px; FONT-WEIGHT: normal; FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Helvetica; TEXT-DECORATION: underline}
.box   


But they still exist in the themes code class=small and so on.

Edit* I take that back they are in the style.css Hmn guess I'm as lost as you on this.

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storebuilder







PostPosted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 6:53 am Reply with quote

They are in the style.css but they are not being used properly.

Read your chatterbox top story and then view source - you will see that "storytitle" is nowhere to be found. The only thing that defines where the story begins is that it is bolded:

Quote:

<td background="themes/Sky-Blue/images/guk_story_05.gif" width="100%"><b>Chatterbox Now Available</b></td>
 
Raven







PostPosted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 6:57 am Reply with quote

Would you try fiapple and let me know if it resolves okay?
 
storebuilder







PostPosted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 7:37 am Reply with quote

It doesn't seem to matter which theme I choose I get the same result.
 
Raven







PostPosted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 7:44 am Reply with quote

Then, respectfully, I would have to disagree with your assertion, because I was using fiapple until I changed over to Sky-Blue. I am not arguing Wink, just saying that your hypothesis might be correct but if the source isn't bearing it out, how do we know?
 
storebuilder







PostPosted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 8:33 am Reply with quote

Well the source IS bearing out because you have no "storytitle" in your source code - whichever theme you use?
 
Raven







PostPosted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 10:22 am Reply with quote

But, when I was being visited into the thousands of times and before this one I was using fiapple. Thats what I mean. Try the other theme ExtraLite and see what it says. I just meant that I agree there is a problem but if fiapple doesn't use it and I was using fiapple when I was getting googled, then it seems that there may/must be another cause?
 
storebuilder







PostPosted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 11:28 am Reply with quote

Look at your search engine listings.

site:www.ravenphpscripts.com see how all of the descriptions are the same? They are all picking up from the first text on your page which is the donations block.

Now do this:

site:www.storebuilder.co.uk

See how all of the descriptions are from the actual news story or post?

What i am suggesting is that because all of the content appears similar or the same to google then it has given up visiting you so often. Why waste a resource on visiting loads of pages that appear identical?

Google strives to be top search engine - it is it's purpose in life. There is absolutely no reason why it would abandon a major resource for no reason. It would only be hurting itself. it prides itself on having the most topical information, that's the reason for it's freshbots etc.

The other theme is the same BTW.

Also google knows what links are being clicked on to the related search - it's how it adjusts it's algorithm to present the most useful information, so if none of your links are being clicked on because they are not relevant then it would assume that the content is rubbish, which it is clearly not.

Saying that "well it worked before" is fair enough, but the google algorithm changes often and if it is not seeing content where it would expect to find it then that would explain it's disappearance.
 
storebuilder







PostPosted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 11:31 am Reply with quote

And to add to the growing pile of evidence for my case I will also mention that unless you address this issue then google could visit you 1,000 times a day and you still wouldn't get anywhere because it is not listing your content properly.
 
Raven







PostPosted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 11:49 am Reply with quote

storebuilder wrote:
It doesn't seem to matter which theme I choose I get the same result.
fiapple is returning 10 occurrences which would equate to 10 stories on my front page. Are you saying that is not enough now?
 
storebuilder







PostPosted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 12:32 pm Reply with quote

This is what a spider sees
[ Only registered users can see links on this board! Get registered or login! ]
 
Raven







PostPosted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 12:49 pm Reply with quote

Interesting because the page is gzip'd. I wonder why the spider is only accepting Content Type plain/text? I turned the gzip off and it looks ok, but I incur more overhead. Is there a tool like this for Google?
 
sixonetonoffun







PostPosted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 1:27 pm Reply with quote

Whoa this is a disturbing development to say the least. But it is begining to make sense at least. Even though it doesn't make sense at all!
 
storebuilder







PostPosted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 1:50 pm Reply with quote

Gulp!

Are you saying that the index page is compressed and uncompressed on demand?
 
Raven







PostPosted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 1:59 pm Reply with quote

Yep (all pages if gzip is enabled). It's called content negotiation. The HTTP Protocol asks the browser if it's okay to send compressed and if the browser says sure, then it sends it compressed and the browser decompresses it. Otherwise it sends it as plain text. But, from all appearences the Spider was not. I think it's an error in the spider software, but we'll see. If you run my site through an HTML validation site that analyzes it, it congratulates me when I had it compressed. Now it's not so happy Sad. But, if that's it (I'm not too sure) then it's a small price to pay.
 
storebuilder







PostPosted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 2:36 pm Reply with quote

But HTML validation is different to what a spider would see?

try this one [ Only registered users can see links on this board! Get registered or login! ]
Edit to add and also do the disappearing bots coincide with your introduction of gzip time wise?
 
Raven







PostPosted: Wed Sep 15, 2004 2:57 pm Reply with quote

Possibly. But, if that's the case then I dare say that there are hundreds of thousands of web sites that aren't getting spidered because content compression is a very efficient method to speed up,browser response time. I will continue to study on this. Thanks.
 
storebuilder







PostPosted: Thu Sep 16, 2004 6:32 am Reply with quote

I would hazard a guess that there are only about 50,000 sites that warrant enough traffic to consider compression, and out of those a small proportion would be database driven sites.

If you turn it off for a couple of days that's all the time you need to see if it is the culprit or not.
 
Raven







PostPosted: Thu Sep 16, 2004 6:46 am Reply with quote

I turned it off yesterday just to see if that matters. Just for curiosity though, I ran nukecops through that link and their site is compressed and I dare say that they get googled, wouldn't you? I think there is something else amiss though. It appears Google is indexing my home page. The articles are there. It's the forums that he seems to be staying away from. I just can't figure this one out Confused
 
sixonetonoffun







PostPosted: Thu Sep 16, 2004 7:12 am Reply with quote

It seems that Google cache is the key to the descriptions being listed. If no cache exists no description is givin in the results. How to fix? I dunno!
 
blith
Client



Joined: Jul 18, 2003
Posts: 977

PostPosted: Thu Sep 16, 2004 7:44 am Reply with quote

Hello guys. I am real interested in this subject also. I have not changed a thing on my site and the googlebots, which are the only ones I allow, have stopped coming as often or in as many numbers. I run google ads so I have the corect code in my robots.txt file... Can I get a little help too? I have almost 28,000 members but only a few entries in Google...
 
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