Website not coming up properly on Google

[medved44]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your reply.

The problem is that our site does not appear to be indexed by Google.

Please see

site: http://www.roguevalleymicro.com/index.php

The site does not come up.

Mike

[GPainter]

I see it -

HKbbTwx

[medved44]

Chris, it's not indexed properly (what you are seeing is some sort of a different listing on Google; perhaps a Google Products page listing)

If you type in:

site: http://www.roguevalleymicro.com/index.php

the page does not come up.

site: page URL  is the way to test if a page is indexed by Google.

Do you see what I mean?

Mike

[GPainter]

Have you checked your webmaster tools and did you set up both http: & www. to set your preferred domain?  It is very strange.  If they are both set up it's also a good way to check if you have a penalty

[medved44]

Hi Chris,

Just to confirm, you are talking about Google Webmaster tools, correct?

If so, under what setting can we check that both http: & www. are set up as our preferred domain?

Also, how can we check if we have a penalty?

Many thanks,

Mike

[GPainter]

Hi Mike,

I just wrote a loverly long response but Moz thought it was spam and blocked me so in a shorter version here are the following helpful resources -

Setting up WMT - http://www.bruceclay.com/newsletter/volume117/set-up-google-webmaster-tools.htm

Setting preferred domain - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/44231?hl=en

Side note to preferred domain a lot of people also use canonical tag to do the same

Penalty guide - http://monitorbacklinks.com/blog/seo/identify-recover-google-penalty/

Even if that's not the problem it's still good knowledge to have. Any problems I'm sure the Moz community can help

[medved44]

Many thanks Chris!

Mike

[medved44]

Many thanks Chris!

By the way, would you be able to email me your other response to mikepinelis@earthlink.net

Mike

[spencerhjustice]

This is mostly speculation but it almost looks like Google is choosing to index http://www.roguevalleymicro.com/ instead of http://www.roguevalleymicro.com/index.php.

If you search for site:roguevalleymicro.com it shows http://www.roguevalleymicro.com/ with the title and meta description for http://www.roguevalleymicro.com/index.php.

It might be doing that because almost every single link, including the google+ page link to http://www.roguevalleymicro.com instead of http://www.roguevalleymicro.com/index.php.

I would actually advise that you rewrite http://www.roguevalleymicro.com/index.php to http://www.roguevalleymicro.com/ which is more aesthetically pleasing and will probably fix your issue.

[medved44]

Hello Spencer,

Many thanks for your feedback.

Could you please comment further on what you mean by "rewriting" http://www.roguevalleymicro.com/index.php to http://www.roguevalleymicro.com/ ?

Mike

[spencerhjustice]

Via .htaccess file in the root of your site you can use mod rewrite to display http://www.roguevalleymicro.com/index.php as http://www.roguevalleymicro.com/ instead.

It would look something like:

Rewrite index.php to root

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} index.php
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.php$ /$1 [R=301,L]

I can't say I'm master at .htaccess files, so that may not be 100% correct.

It would be better if someone with a little more experience with rewrites could add their input.

[medved44]

Got it -- thank you very much!

Mike