Network unreachable or robots.txt not reachable

Posted by admin in Tuesday, July 8th 2008   
Topics: Google    Tags: ,
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Recently, I changed the hosting company for my website http://bazaarlive.info and I noticed that Google webmaster’s tool central area was showing error in the sitemap of my website.

If you are also getting “Network unreachable or robots.txt not reachable” error message in the Google Webmaster’s area, then you can take it for sure that there is some grave problem with your host’s server and not a glitch in google system.

I googled about this problem and noticed that this is a very common error but no solution has been suggested anywhere. So, I thought of writing here.

Usually this problem arises when host server blocks google bot from accessing your website by denying access to google IPs in the server firewall.

Google tries to ping the server for the robots.txt file or sitemap.xml but because the IP was denied access in the iptables, googlebots are not able to access the robots.txt file and hence the problem.

So here is what one must do to fix this error:-

1. Do iptables-save &> /home/username/temp-ip-tables.txt

Cross check all IP addresses in the /home/username/temp-ip-tables.txt file using arin.net/whois and note if any of those ips belong to googlebot. If any ip (usually 66.249.x.x) belongs to google then make sure you remove it from iptables (csf.deny file) which can vary depending on the firewall you/your host are using.

To whitelist Google, you can whitelist 66.249.*.*

IPs of other important search engines are:-

Allow from 127.0.0.1
Allow from 65.55                # MSN
Allow from 66.249               # Google
Allow from 67.195               # Yahoo!
Allow from 72.30                # Yahoo!
Allow from 74.6                 # Yahoo!
Allow from 122.152.129.15       # Baidu

I hope this post will help many people.

How to Avoid the Negative-Sixty Penalty from Google

Posted by admin in Wednesday, June 18th 2008   
Topics: Google, Website Promotion    Tags: , ,
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Has your website been affected by the new unconfirmed position penalty from Google?

Is your website at risk for this penalty? If your website purchases site-wide links that contain spam characteristics, you may be one of the affected websites. It seems as though search engines such as Google are penalizing sites that contain spam and links that they purchased and placed on every page of their websites.

What seems to be happening is that a site that was thought would be appearing within the top sixty search results on Google, is dropping to sixty-one. One of the possible reasons for this is that Google sees websites that are including paid links on their sites as a violation of attempting to increase the results of their searches without following the guidelines set in place by Google.

Unfortunately, it is not only what webmasters themselves may be adding or allowing on their websites, but what other competitor websites may be adding that can cause the same problem and penalties. If another website adds these kinds of site-wide links to your website, Google and other search engines cannot tell who added them, but only that they are there. This could mean you potentially could be paying for what other webmasters do to your website without even knowing it.

There doesn’t seem to be an easy answer or remedy to this problem. Google is trying to protect itself from perpetrators who do these kinds of scams, but there could be a lot of innocent websites that get caught in this web. One suggestion would be that Google and other search engines would ignore the links that could be spam, or sites thought to be site-wide on a website instead of assuming those websites are to blame and unfairly taking action against the innocent websites. The best way to protect your website is to only use methods to optimize your results that are ethically responsible.

While the notion of keeping unethical websites from benefiting from getting the best search results is a good one, there needs to be some sort of system in play that protects the good websites that are being wrongly targeted and penalized for the acts and behaviors of those not abiding by the ethical standards.

If you have any doubts on what might be considered spam methods for gaining better search results, a few things to avoid include: using methods that are attempting to fool the search engine, stuffing certain key-words, doorway pages that are generated upon clicks, and hiding texts or links within your search. These are a few ways to find yourself feeling the wrath of the Negative-Sixty plan from Google. To take things a step further to help protect yourself, you should check your website for those kinds of items that might have been placed there without your knowing.

Ensuring you do not fall victim to losing your search engine ranking, is a big step you can take to protect your website

Your websites User Friendliness and how it affects your Search Engine Rankings?

Posted by admin in Wednesday, June 18th 2008   
Topics: SEOTips, Website Promotion    Tags: , ,
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If you are wondering if how your website performs for visitors affects how major search engines rank your website, you may be surprised to learn that there are direct connections between the two. If your website is easy to use, search engines may be more apt to give you a higher search engine ranking than if it is not.

It seems as though search engines such as Yahoo are taking advantage of a new application that can help them determine how user friendly your website may be. It can track the design on your website and add that to the number of factors that major search engines utilize when giving rankings to websites. In essence, websites that have better usability and are easier to navigate through generally have not only much higher quality but also a higher conversion rate than their cluttered counterparts. The new application that Yahoo is using compiles a list of 51 factors that it uses to determine how usable a website is. Below are a few examples of those criteria.

  • How Ads are Positioned on your web pages
  • The amount of words on your site
  • The amount of links on your site
  • The amount of images that are not from ads
  • The total area of your page
  • The length of your page
  • How many columns you have for each table
  • How many text ads are present
  • How many image ads are present
  • How many image ads are above the fold of the webpage
  • How many image ads are below the fold of the webpage
  • How many text ads are above the fold of the webpage
  • How many text ads are below the fold of the webpage
  • How many sponsored ads are present
  • How many sponsored ads are above the fold of the webpage
  • How many sponsored ads are below the fold of the webpage
  • How many internal ads are present
  • How many internal ads are above the fold of the webpage
  • How many internal ads are below the fold of the webpage
  • How many external ads are present
  • How many external ads are above the fold of the webpage
  • How many external ads are below the fold of the webpage
  • How much of your page is used for ads
  • The area of ads above the fold of your webpage

Other search engines such as Google also use similar applications to determine the rankings. If you want your website to be high ranking, make sure you have excellent visibility and that you have very limited clutter on your website. If you are getting lots of visitors to your site, but not a lot of sales it may be time to take another look at the design of your webpage and make the necessary changes to ensure high ranking with the search engines.

Website Disappeared from Google Results

Posted by admin in Saturday, May 31st 2008   
Topics: Google    Tags: , ,
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If you are a website owner and keep tracking the traffic inflow, then you may experience at some time that google has dropped your website in its search results.  If you are facing this problem currently, then we can understand the kind of time you are going through.  But don’t worry there is a way out.  And most importantly, Sit back and relax and wait for day or two.

Here are few steps to help you find the reason for this situation:

Search google for ” site:www.yourwebsite.com ”

@ If Google doesn’t show any pages from your site then it’s likely that your entire site has been banned. The reason for this could be use of Black Hat SEO techniques, Spamming, etc.  If this has happened, then you may request google to re include your website after you have edited the website, removed keyword stuffing, invisible text and other blackhat seo techniques.

@ If Google shows pages from your website, then the problem is not that grave.  Reason for such kind of situation could be:-

1. Your website has been placed in Sandbox.   This happens particularly with new websites and it may take 3 to 9 month for website to come out of the sandbox.  SOme webmaster however feel that this time period can be reduced by building quality in links to your website.

2. If you are not using a good quality hosting service then you will face this situation more than ofen.  What happens is that if your website is down when google bots come for crawling, then google will drop the ranking of your website in search results.

3. The last reason could be that your website is facing competition from other websites who are targeting same keywords.

Hopefully I’ve given you some ideas about how to track down the source of your site’s disappearance from Google.

Contextual Link Building Using Blog

Posted by admin in Sunday, May 25th 2008   
Topics: SEOTips    
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A comparatively new process in the world of Internet Marketing is contextual link building. It involves regular review of your website with the difference that instead of search engine, these reviews will be conducted by blog on the net. In result, your website will be linked back to some other website having relevancy of the topic. The anchor text of course will be your choice. Once original blog posts are created and they are linked to your website, your campaigning for the website optimization will be greatly supported.

Key features of Link Building using blog are that each blog will be having different IP address. They will never link to adult websites or defamed ones. The linking shall be ordinarily one-way without any reciprocation. Such inbound links will enhance the position of your website for search engine optimization. The blog that is floated shall have original contents only so that your site will appear only on single blog at a time without any duplication.

The blog contents shall be original and written and not software generation should be made. Each blog should be supported by authoritative back link profiles. Only permanent links and the sites with good page ranking are linked so that you will not drop down due to bad linking on the search engine page. Always make a point to avoid link farms. They are not conducive to Website Promotion. The process will generate traffic for your site and consumers will start believing you.

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