18 Common Reasons For Poor Search Engine Ranking
Reasons 10 - 12
Reason 10: Your web site address contains special characters
Most search engines have problems indexing web pages when their URLs
contain special characters. The following special characters are known to be
"search-engine-spider-stoppers":
- ampersand (&)
- dollar sign ($)
- equals sign (=)
- percent sign (%)
- question mark (?)
These characters are often found on dynamically generated web pages. They
signal the search engine spider that there could be an infinite loop of
possibilities for that page. That's why they ignore web page URLs with the
above characters.
Reason 11: Your web site was not accessible
If your web site fails to respond when the search engine spider visits
your site, it will not be indexed. Even worse, if your web site is already
indexed and the search engine spider could not access your site for an
extended of period of time, you'll often be removed from the search engine
database.
It's essential to choose a reliable web space provider to host your web
site to prevent such problem from occurring.
Reason 12: You have blocked search engine robots at your web site
It is possible that you may have blocked the search engine spiders from
indexing your web site by mistake. There are two ways to block search engine
robots: a) with the robots.txt file in the root directory of your web site,
or b) with the "robots" meta tag in the web pages.
a) Robots.txt
Many web sites have a plain text file named "robots.txt" in the root
directory. It contains rules for the search engine spiders. The rules in the
robots.txt file follow the Robots Exclusion Protocol, a document designed to
help web masters and authors of web spiders agree on a way to navigate and
index web sites.
The content of the robots.txt file consists of two main commands:
"User-agent" and "Disallow".
The User-agent command specifies the name of the robot for which the
following commands should be applied to. You can set this to "*" and apply
the command to all robots.
The second command, "Disallow", specifies a partial URL that should not
be indexed by the search engine robot.
For example:
---
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
---
The above commands tell all search engine spider to go away. If you find
a text file called "robots.txt" in the root directory of the host server
with the above content, you should delete it immediately. The text file says
that no search engine is allowed to index your web site.
Even if your robots.txt file don't contain the above commands, you should
make sure that its syntax is correct. A robots.txt file with a faulty syntax
also prevents search engine spiders to index your web site.
b) The ROBOTS meta tag
There's a second way to stop search engine robot from indexing your web
site: the ROBOTS meta tag. If you find the following HTML tag in your web
pages:
---
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex, nofollow">
---
you should replace it immediately with
---
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT"="index, follow">
---
If you want all search engine spiders to index all web pages, you can
also remove the ROBOTS meta tag from your web pages.
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