pls check .htaccess google not indexing homepage

[redsy]

I have been helping a friend with a site, it had not been hosted for a while, its is now back and google have indexed all pages apart from homepage.

in my .htaccess i have

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]*/)*index\.html? [NC]
RewriteRule ^(([^/]*/)*)index\.html?$ http://www.rainbowenergyassessors.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^rainbowenergyassessors\.co\.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.rainbowenergyassessors.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

Redirect 301 /landlords.html http://www.rainbowenergyassessors.co...lords_EPC.html
Redirect 301 /solicitors.html http://www.rainbowenergyassessors.co...itors_EPC.html
Redirect 301 /contact.html http://www.rainbowenergyassessors.co...Assessors.html
Redirect 301 /links.html http://www.rainbowenergyassessors.co...EPC_links.html


I have used a similar format before and not had problems, any help appreciated

 

[seopaul]

i don't see a problem with your rewrites and the page displays correctly to a normal visitor and when you pretend to be google viewing the page.

ive found bizarre problems like this in the past with google when getting a site back online again after some down time, at the moment google are not showing any links for your site (dosnt mean they dont know about any links coming in just that there not important enough to show)

{note i cant post a link as im under 10 posts but enter this in google without spacing}

link  :   h  t  t  p  :  /  /  w   w  w .  rainbowenergyassessors  . co  .  uk -site:rainbowenergyassessors.co.uk

i would get a few inbound links to the site and also put a robots.txt file up give it a week or two and see where your at...

 

[redsy]

i don't see a problem with your rewrites and the page displays correctly to a normal visitor and when you pretend to be google viewing the page.

ive found bizarre problems like this in the past with google when getting a site back online again after some down time, at the moment google are not showing any links for your site (dosnt mean they dont know about any links coming in just that there not important enough to show)

{note i cant post a link as im under 10 posts but enter this in google without spacing}

link  :   h  t  t  p  :  /  /  w   w  w .  rainbowenergyassessors  . co  .  uk -site:rainbowenergyassessors.co.uk

i would get a few inbound links to the site and also put a robots.txt file up give it a week or two and see where your at...

I read somewhere that sites being down, then being rebuilt can sometimes demonstrate this peculiaritiy ie not indexing homepage - quite strange.

The other pages that are all indexed are new urls. I just wondered as index.html is being redirected to mydomain.co.uk is it inaffect not recognising mydomain.co.uk at all and only pages for eg mydomain.co.uk/example.html.

Wondered if i should remove .htaccess allow google to find index.html then put .htaccess back.

 

[seopaul]

the problem with doing that is that your doing exactly what that rewrite is stoping... dupe content... if you open index.html then google can index both index.html and mydomain.co.uk....

have you got google webmaster tools set up for you domain? as that might give you some more detailed information on how google are accsessing your site

 

[redsy]

the problem with doing that is that your doing exactly what that rewrite is stoping... dupe content... if you open index.html then google can index both index.html and mydomain.co.uk....

have you got google webmaster tools set up for you domain? as that might give you some more detailed information on how google are accsessing your site

yes but only been added recently last week or so. At present it shows very little, and reports no problems accesssing pages etc. in fact no errors at all.

So based on this info there seems to be no glaring reason why google wont eventually index mydomain.co.uk as a page on its own?

 

[seopaul]

yeah as far as i can see there's no big omg what are you doing kind of problem with your site, just seams like google is being lame... like it does do... if your not getting that homepage ranked soon... like the next week or so i would be a little worryed... why dont you do some free directory submitions, it wont give much se value but will certainly start the ball rolling

Free Directory of Web Directories

 

[redsy]

yeah as far as i can see there's no big omg what are you doing kind of problem with your site, just seams like google is being lame... like it does do... if your not getting that homepage ranked soon... like the next week or so i would be a little worryed... why dont you do some free directory submitions, it wont give much se value but will certainly start the ball rolling

Free Directory of Web Directories

Thanks again for your help, done some submissions etc all linked to my domain.co.uk

 

[seopaul]

thats cool keep me updated on what happens

 

[Dimitar Christoff]

as far as i know there are various tools / FF extensions that can help you to debug and trace redirects (http header handlers) - so you can see if it does not get into a loop or something odd that can cause the crawler to lose patience... thats just a guess anyway.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^rainbowenergyassessors\.co\.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.rainbowenergyassessors.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

perhaps worth changing to somehting like:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.rainbowenergyassessors\.co\.uk

anyway, i avoid doing such rewrites as a rule of thumb - i find they are not necessary - just ALWAYS define a site url in a var and pre-pend all site links - never link 'locally' as <a href='/index.php'> but rather as <a href='<?=$siteurl?>index.php'>

there are two benefits to this:
1. no matter how they come in (under whatever domain), any subsequent link followed will go to the right domain/url
2. it's good for seo to have the domain in the href anyway.

 

[seopaul]

[EDIT: my comment isnt ment to take away from the above comment as its good to have full links but points out it dosnt quite solve the problem]

its needed because it's duplicate data on every page your site has as there is a non www version and a www version... havnt looked into this recently as ive eased of the seo side of recent years in favour of learning to program but not so long ago this was a well talked about problem and somthing alot of my clients had issues with.... its the same as google finding your index.html and the mydomain.co.uk....

if server load is an issue the answer is simple... get a bigger server... load balence what ever.. but theres a time to cut corners and a time not to

a script i use... and dont tend to shout about is... CrawlTrack, the spiders and crawlers tracking script. it will let you know what spiders are on your site... where they go etc the easyest way to tell what a search engine is going with your site is install SE bot tracking.

 

[redsy]

Quick update on this, now indexed

 

[seopaul]

Perfect!!