Tag Archive for 'google'

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?!

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.

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?!

Unlocking a G1 from T-Mobile

Published
by
Eric Greer
on January 11, 2009
in Guides and newbie.blog
. 0 Comments

When I heard about the first Google phone, the T-Mobile G1, I was stoked. As soon as they were available in my area I ordered two.

But then, with my infinate amount of luck, it turns out the T-Mobile service map was wrong and I didn’t service in my area. The phone was only good for using wifi. I was horribly upset!

Because I never give up on tech easily, I set out to figure out a solution. The apn list on the G1 showed ATT in my area, and it seemed to have a good signal because it was always there. I did a bit of googling and it turns out that there is a website out there that will sell you an unlock code for about 20 bucks. Just google it… im not linking it here.

So i went ahead and found the IPMI number for a G1 I had on ebay and sent it in with my 20 bucks. They replied back pretty quick!

Next I went out and bought an ATT phone plan on a month to month billing cycle. Easy.

Then I stuck in my ATT sim card and turned on the phone. It prompted me for the unlock code. I have been told that a typo at this stage causes the phone to hardware lock… I typed very carefully… and it unlocked instantly!

But it wasnt working yet… the ATT APN settings had to be entered manually. The site I bought the unlock code from had some example ATT settings which I added. They seem to work well, but 3G does not work. From what I hear, it’s possible to figure out a combination of settings that enables 3G but I don’t get in my area and thus don’t care enough to figure it out.

So not only have I unlocked my G1 and can use it at my house, but the resale value went up too! On EBay these phones are selling for more than you can buy an unlocked developer phone from google directly for. I won’t lie… I’ve bought and resold a few!

I love the G1. Android is the obvious sucessor for phone operating systems in my eyes… especially since the list of features is just getting started. The key to using the G1 is to think of it as a computer first and a phone second. I can FTP, SSH, edit photos, make and use custom ringtones and tons more right on the phone. A matter of fact, I wrote this whole post right on the phone… sweet!