Why can't I Google our new website?

[mum mum]

Hi,

I recently set up a free website for the Granya Heritage Commitee which has a collection of family histories, photo's, mining information, land records and farming equipment on display. The Granya Pioneer Museum hosts tour buses and other groups who are interested in local history, prior bookings are necessary as all staff are volunteers.

I set up the website hoping that people researching their family history would Google Granya and their family name and come across our site.

http://granyapioneermuseum.webs.com/

Unfortunately I can't even find it on Google when I type in the name 'Granya Pioneer Museum'.
Can someone tell me why?
mum mum

[Hibee]

This doesn't happen immediately, but it will be picked up soon, on one of their periodic sweeps for new sites.

Hibee

[[Ray]]

Hi

"The Granya Pioneer Museum evolved out of a love for the past and the many families who have roots in the area. Records date back to 1836, including photographs, land records and family histories."

What maybe important is that it is not your domain but a sub-domain and coding within the master domain may have a bearing on the situation longer term.
eg they may add a robots index saying "do not index". (this IS a nonsensical example)

Your "home page" is considered a single page domain, with all of the other pages as separate "external" links.
There are no Internal links (probably because all of the links are a sub-domain of the main "Webs.com" domain.
I couldn't see any Alt descriptions to the images used.
You could polish the contents of the meta tags, in general "people" do not read the meta tags,
they are used to index/find information.
Words like "of a and the many who have in the including and" are extraneous and ignored


Why not use one of the free SEO assessment sites and put your main address in it?
What ever it says, make the changes coz that is free.

Of course this is just my view ....................

Regards

Ray

[Wharfrat]

Interesting that this thread is the 2nd hit on Google, though.

Your website is the #1 hit on the Yahoo search, though!

[[Ray]]

Hi wharfrat

Yahoo #1 = If you know the term you are looking for then of course you are going to find it, if it exists.

If you did not know that the Granya Pioneer Museum existed, then why would you look for it, specifically?

Are you still with me? Am I still with me?


If you google "wharfrat rootschat" ......... you get your own good self!


Ray

[Sikes]

mum mum, its a known issue with webs.com & google (DNS problems). The front page is in Googles index but you may run into problems getting it to rank. At least its free! You could try Google Webmaster tools to find out exactly whats going on.

[mum mum]

Hi
Thanks for the replies, I think the webs.com answers is possibly the one. I have even tried Googling the actual name and get nothing, it has been a couple of months since we started the site.
I had hoped that if people searched for "family history' and their surname that it may find our site as I have listed all the family names that we have information on.
I even started a facebook page for us with a link to the site, and I am contacting other sites that our museum is mentioned on asking them to add links.
I have noticed how easy it is to find a Rootschat post when Googling, hopefully some ressearchers will come across this post if they had family at Granya.
mum mum

[[Ray]]

Hi

This may not work for reasons already mentiuoned but this definitely will not hurt.

Create two text files and call them robots.txt and content.txt (all lower case)
Put them both in the "root" directory/folder (home page folder)

robots.txt file is ..............
# robots.txt for GranyaPioneerMuseum.Webs.com
# version 1.0 - 11 October 2011

user-agent: Googlebot
allow: /content.txt
disallow: /

user-agent: *
disallow: /


content.txt file is ...........
# content.txt for GranyaPioneerMuseum.Webs.com
# version 1.0 - 11 October 2011

mum mum - family history Granya Pioneer Museum
Joe Brown - family history Granya Pioneer Museum
etc., 1 line for each person


This (should) allows google (only) to access (only) the content.txt file
You can add Yahoo etc later if it works.

Ray

Anyone spot a mistake? Please shout!

[Wharfrat]

I'm no technical expert on these matters, but the point I was crudely trying to make is that different search engines work in different ways, and if you use the same search term in different engines, you get very different results!