Archive for the 'Web Design' Category

Google is brutal with sitemap errors. Be Warned!

Published
by
Eric Greer
on June 11, 2010
in Other Sites of Mine and Web Design
. 0 Comments

Google has de-listed my game servers startup from its indexes. I went from a steadily climbing position to being not listed instantly. Why you ask? What pisses off the Google gods? Not much, apparently.

You see, I use vim to write all my websites. I know its not the best way to do things but gosh darn-it for some reason I just always end up coming back to it. One of the shortcuts in vim is Shift-A. This starts editing at the end of a line.

I was happily updating my sitemap by hand when I ended up pressing Shift-A on extra time. Unknowingly, I committed that miss-placed capital “A” into my sitemap and published it. Google happily crawled my sitemap not too long later and found the typo. They could have looked the other direction and threw a warning on webmaster tools, but instead they entirely de-listed me. Sounds fair to me.

But, theres a ray of hope. Chrome has built-in XML error checking. If you simply open up your sitemap in Google Chrome before actually making it live, it will display any validation errors in big red letters at the top of the page.

I of course fixed problem as soon as I saw it i webmaster tools and resubmitted my sitemap. Google even shows my pages as indexed but just will not display them in searches. I’m assuming is a temporary thing and that they’ll re-list me, but I can only guess. They’ve crawled and accepted my new site map, but are apparently waiting over a week to re-list me!

I’m sorry Google! Stop the madness! Can’t we be friends?!

Google is weird how it crawls websites…

Published
by
Eric Greer
on September 18, 2009
in Web Design
. 0 Comments

I recently have been working on a side project hosting dedicated game servers at HostedGameServers.com and have been hitting a lot of snags.

Basically, the site used to be at Hostedd.com and was doing ‘ok’ for Google rank. It was steadily climbing the ladder toward page one. I decided since the domain hostedd.com had only been around for a month or two, I would re-brand the entire company to Hosted Game Servers so relevant things were in the URL. I also went ahead and added a keyword or two in my page URLs. I set my prior domain hostedd.com to be a 301 redirect to hostedgameservers.com and figured all was well. I setup the old URLs to redirect to the new slightly longer URLs with keywords in them in case anyone hit the old URLs.

I generated a new sitemap, added the new site to google analytics and google webmaster tools. A strange thing happened. Google appeared to crawl one of the old non-existent pages that I had a redirect for… detected it missing (thats how it handles RewriteRule?!!?) and left my site promptly! It didn’t return for days. Considering I had a current sitemap which mentioned NOTHING of these files; its rather weird it even tried to visit them.

Wow I thought… what a setback. I’m sure this kind of thing is on my record with Google for awhile….

So I went and requested removal of he old URLs from google at both the new and old domain names. Google denied them 24 hours later because they were not restricted by my robots.txt. In the mean time google crawled my website again, ignored what was listed in my html and xml sitemaps, hit a redirect and reported it as a couple 404 missing pages. WTF? My web host is wasn’t even having outages! I did all this sitemap and immigration work and google tagged my domain with a big red F for having what it thinks are 404 errors. Total crap!

So anyway, I requested removal again after adding the old url’s to the robots.txt file and they were accepted. Google crawled my site again, indexed two pages, and left. My site is ranking horribly, even if i search for all the words in the new domain name and all I can do is wait.

It’s common practice o use rewrite rules and rename pages. I’m really surprised this caused complications with the internet giant. It’s really frustrating and for an internet business can be deadly. Maybe google has become scored and petrified of google rank stealing tricks?!

Some Useful Run Commands

Published
by
Eric Greer
on July 7, 2008
in Web Design and newbie.blog
. 0 Comments

I use a ton of run line commands whenever I can – here’s a few i use the most often. Time savers for sure!

These work in Vista, 2003 and XP:
ncpa.cpl – network control panel
control userpasswords2 – local user management
. – goes to your local user folder
.. – goes to users folder
firewall.cpl – you guessed it, windows firewall
main.cpl – mouse controls (lol?)
control – control panel
mstsc – remote desktop (use /v:address for direct connections)

Server 2003:
dsa.msc – active directory

Got some more? I’m sure i’ll think of more later, but its my 3rd post today and im going to bed!

FX5200 and 8800GT Video cards DO NOT work in the same system.

Published
by
Eric Greer
on June 26, 2008
in Web Design and newbie.blog
. 0 Comments

I wanted to upgrade my current PCIex16 NVIDIA 8800GT computer with two monitor outs to have a third monitor. I have the monitor sitting here, ready to go, and i ordered a PCI (not PCIe card, which I have no more mobo slots for) FX5200 because the www.nvidia.com site shows Vista drivers for it. I use Vista 32bit.

So I got the card and excitedly installed. Drivers install, BSOD. Crap.

Restarted, fiddled, tried different driver versions, changed video priority in the BIOS, nothing helped. I even tried some modded video cards from some 3rd party sites in the hopes they would magically bypass this problem – nope.

In short, in case you’re wanting to install an NVIDIA FX5200 with an NVIDIA 8800GT, it just doesn’t work. NVIDIA sadly does not give a shit either, because I can find a few others posting about this online too, with no help from NVIDIA or plans for a future driver.