chaseman Posted January 26, 2011 Share Posted January 26, 2011 My website has finally been indexed on google, but when I search for it I only get: www.domainname.com/ With no page description etc. The website description is in the meta tags between the head tags, I've used the tags the right way, but for some reason Google doesn't seem to pick up on it, why is that? On the Google help site it says to use for every page a different meta description, I haven't done that since I'm including the header.php into every page. Could that be the reason that google is ignoring the meta tags? This is how I have it: <head> <meta name="description" content="--page-description--here--" /> <meta name="keywords" content="---keywords--here---" /> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <title> TITLE </title> <--google-analytics-script-here-> </head> Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
haku Posted January 26, 2011 Share Posted January 26, 2011 Two possibilities: 1) Are you using a doctype? There isn't one in the code you showed us, and if you don't have one, since you are using XHTML syntax, it may confuse google. 2) Your content type meta tag should always come first before anything else in your head. It's possible that since it's coming after the others, that may be causing you some troubles. Purely speculation though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chaseman Posted January 26, 2011 Author Share Posted January 26, 2011 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <meta name="description" content="--description----" /> <meta name="keywords" content="---keywords---" /> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type"text/css" href="style.css" /> <title>WebSiteName | <?php echo $pagetitle; ?></title> <script type="text/javascript"> -google script- </script> </head> <body> Ok this is the full header.php file that I include in the other pages. One thing I forgot to mention is that this website is written in German (my 2nd language), could the language have an effect on this as well? As far as I know the language in the doctype refers only to the HTML attributes and not the content. Very strange is as well when I find my website in the GERMAN google search results it's giving me an option to translate the website. Why would it do that, when I'm searching in German Google (meaning: google.de) in the first place? The meta description and keywords are in German as well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chaseman Posted January 26, 2011 Author Share Posted January 26, 2011 Maybe it's simply not FULLY indexed? Because when I google for the domain name, I get just the domain name as a search result but if I google for clear and distinct keywords, I don't get the website in the search results at all. I've read somewhere that it can take 3 months until the website is completely ranking in the search results, and I have it only up for like 2 weeks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
haku Posted January 27, 2011 Share Posted January 27, 2011 Your content type meta tag still isn't the first thing in your head. It should be - move that up. Second, the reason your site is coming up to translate is because you have said it is in English. You need to change your html tag to this: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="de" lang="de"> (if German isn't 'de', then change it to whatever it is) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chaseman Posted January 27, 2011 Author Share Posted January 27, 2011 Many thanks for clarifying this, when you said "content type" I first thought of all meta tags all together, I didn't realize you meant that one tag after those two. And thanks for the language setting as well, I will take those changes now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chaseman Posted January 30, 2011 Author Share Posted January 30, 2011 I have done all the changes appropriately and have uploaded the new files onto the web server, but after 3-4 days Google still seems to not pick up on it, is there a way I can make it pick up on it faster? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
haku Posted January 31, 2011 Share Posted January 31, 2011 Unfortunately, no. They will do it at their own pace. It could take up to a couple of months. One thing you can do however is make sure you have a Google Webmaster Tools account, with your site registered in that. It may not make google pick up your site faster, but the will give you advice about any problems within your site. So if you haven't already made an account, you should. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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