Monthly Archive for June, 2010

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?!

Game Servers… not ‘SEVERS’! A tale of Google SEO.

Published
by
Eric Greer
on June 2, 2010
in newbie.blog
. 0 Comments

If you’ve ever tried to get your website ranked in a high volume search with Google, it’s basically a life long quest. It’s so much of a quest that people who know very few facts about the topic are actually paid good consulting money in order to take their best guesses at how to get better rankings.

Then, of course, as soon as you do that, Google can just change a gear in its system and you’re dropped right out again. I’ve been going down this road with my game server hosting startup HostedGameServers.com. I have a great service on servers that perform great. I ping 16 to my server and I’m over 1,500 miles from it! We’ve got a few clients and its the best we can do with manual promotion while we work to get listed in Google. Right now we’re about position 408… except if you typo the search.

First, search ‘Game Servers’ in Google. Not listed. Well, we are, but we’re on page 48 or something stupid.

Next, search for ‘Game Severs’. Note the missing r. Yep, we’re first page.

Our keyword significance is perfect. It’s #1 Game #2 Server #3 Hosting and our backlinks aren’t bad (about 125). Our site does nothing against the Google laws of sneaky code, either. I feel like I also have plenty of content.

My best guess as to what is going on involves the proper term ‘Game Servers’ being too valuable to list me, even if I am perfectly relevant. This search term gets a lot of hits, so Google has some high requirements for who gets listed. I’m not sure what those are exactly.

Other searches, like the typo’d ‘game severs’ get much less volume. So much less volume that I show up right on the front page. Why? Because I’m relevant but just not trust worthy enough for some reason. I have never had ’severs’ anywhere in my code base. I grep’d it.

I have no idea what Google wants form me. We provide a good service and our site is relevant for the right terms. We’ve even spent hundreds of man hours trying to get out there and spread links. Man its a hard world with Google!

Shorten links with bit.ly right in the Chrome address bar

Published
by
Eric Greer
on June 2, 2010
in Guides
. 0 Comments

I was busy installing the Google Chrome bit.ly extenstion one day when I noticed an interesting autofill pop up in the address bar.

It said search bit.ly . All I had to do was type bit.ly . Chrome takes you right to bit.ly and shows you the shortened URL.

Works great, no addons required! Nice and fast.