Google "treeid" error

[mcentyre501]

Can anyone tell me why, when I check Google Web Crawl Errors that it's reporting this particular error for my site........

http://www.mcentyrefamilyproject.org/g...s...=yourtreeidhere then it says 404 (not found)

Another Google question (and maybe it's related to the "treeid" error), when I Google "mcentyre" my site doesn't come up in search results. If I type mcentyre +scriven I get another person's site listings who is researching some of my same lines. Yet if I type "McEntyre-Floyd" there it is and that happens to be the title of my main page. McEntyre, Scriven and Floyd are all surnames that are in my database. Why wouldn't my web site come up in search results if those surnames are listed?

Thanks for your help.

Carol

[Rush]

I'm not to sure about the treeid error. Probably would have look at your sitemap file to try figure that out.

Though a simple question about search results, has a rather complex answer.

(People make a living trying to figure that out)

Inbound links from other sites are probably the most important (this can be debated)

Content for meta tags (description / title) are important too (this can be debated also)

Improve page content

Avoid duplicate content

Right now, your meta tags look rather sparse as the are only a few words (about 4 or so).

Rush

[mcentyre501]

Thank you Rush. I'm really very new at all of this. This is probably a really dumb question but what did you mean that my meta tags look sparse...only 4 or so? I haven't made any changes to Template 3 since downloading and installing it. Sounds like maybe I should have?

Carol

[Rush]

I have to apologize, because I wrote the response in kind of hurry and didn't really provide much depth. It is a rather complex solution though.

Your question isn't a dumb one at all:

Your meta tags only contained about 4 words. Here the are as they appear in your source code:

(my comments in bold)

Keywords MCENTYRE Deceased

only two words, 20 or so words are better

Description McEntyre Family Project: MCENTYRE Deceased

the description can be longer

Keywords McEntyre Family Project: Home Page Researching Surnames: McEntyre Scriven Edgerton Edgeton Rice Himmel Mudge Vargason Dickenson Nies Floyd Roberts Clark Clarkston Caudill Whitaker Creech and many more related lines

much better keywords, but because 'keywords' is already listed, this will get ignored by search engines

One can argue the value of meta tags these days. Google doesn't rely on them heavily, but yahoo is more meta tag orientated. As it is right now, strong (relevant to page context) keywords and descriptions can't hurt.

Getting TNG to develop relevant keywords for each page can be a little tricky, but it can be done.

If you want to jump into that a little further, just let me know.

Inbound links from relevant sites (like other genealogy sites) is something Google really seems to like and should help your page ranking with searches. This is one of the reasons that I created the TNG Links page. In the effort to get boost relative links for TNG users.

There are other good genealogy sites to submit your page to, like cyndi's list and what not.

Deep linking (or links that go directly to a person in your site and not the home page) is reported to help also.

One thing to keep in mind, as side what Matt Cutts has said about Google, the only people who know for sure are the folks who write the algorithms for Google. Everything else is just speculation on how Google works...

HTH a little bit.

Rush