Family Business website facing Google indexing problems

Posted on July 9, 2009 by Gary · Posted in Google, Search Engine Optimization, Website Updates

Recently I have developed a website for a family member and after finishing the design, the next stage was to get it indexed into Google. Well we had problems at the first hurdle as the site was taking ages to get indexed even after posting here about it, which usually helps for our other niche sites.

I noticed that the site was indexed when typing in site:domain_name.com but it was only showing the website domain name and no meta description.

After analyzing the site, I came up with the following problems which could explain why it was not showing properly, but this is still unclear as to what the exact cause was.

Robots.txt file was set to Disallow /
- We set this up while designing the site as didn’t want the pages to be indexed with incorrect content or pages and then have to ask Google to remove certain urls etc.
- We had modified this to Allow / quite early on, but maybe it was taken some time for the google robots to pick up these changes. The robots test showed the correct information
We had some javascript on the main home page, this script was a basic expand and collapse text script so had hidden text but when clicked would display the text. This could have been seen by Google as spamming as we could be hiding keywords. But I’m sure loads of other sites use this and don’t have any indexing problems. Anyway this has been changed now to click through to another page, so no more javascript
No 301 .htaccess redirect file set-up so that our non canonical domain http://domain was not being redirected to the http://www.domain… etc. This could have been seen as duplicate content across the domain. This has now been set-up.

Well a few days later and more of the pages are being indexed with the description. Still though the home page or root of the site isn’t showing the description and I’ve triple checked the code, its no different than some of the other pages codes.

For those interested the family site is Expand Internationally or http://www.expandinternationally.com

Any comments/suggestions welcomed