HTML: What if html tidy messes with the page layout ?

Linda in NY · 03-26-2007, 07:43 AM

Hi everyone,

I'm having issues with my html. I tried validating a long time ago. Thought I'd give it another whirl since I've dropped awful in serps in google, plus for some reason, pages with what I thought was decent content, and more than one to two years old, recently dropped in Page Rank to Zero's WTF ? ! Wahh

So anyways, I tried validating using W3C and of course, it's bad ! Now when I tried using html tidy, it changes the layout of my page. My pages are set up to have 3 columns, basically a column on the left, body text and a column on the right. When I use the tidy, it puts the right side column, below the left side column.

When it comes to coding I'm basically a moron, so I figured I'd used the tool to fix it for me, any ideas on other options for this moron to work on this problem.

I worked on my keywords, meta tags, etc. Changed all my page names about 1 yr ago with permanent redirects also because I read names of pages relating to the page content works better than catalog.0. html. The original software I used to make the pages used names like that so I changed them after dropping in serps in google. My page ranks dropped like a rock and never rebounded, and back links are awful. Who'd link to a page with a page rank of zero. Last year some of the pages had PR of 4 now it's 0.

I've dropped in some searches in some areas in MSN now too, but in Yahoo I'm doing pretty good for the products. Weird.

So I thought maybe fix the html first and then review my meta tags etc, and maybe this might help some, I'm at such a loss right now, I'm so ready to cry and throw in the proverbial towel.

I've been struggling with this whole search, serp, PR ordeal for more than a year now with no results. The site was doing excellent for awhile (like 1 yr), then bam.

Any input would be so appreciated,
Linda

Taltos · 03-26-2007, 12:35 PM

You may not be able to use a tool like that to "fix" your pages. Simple things like a </td> (closing a table data tag) missing will make a page look totally different in IE vs FF. Adding it back can get the same result.

You might post the validation results. Also, you can post a link to the problem pages. It helps to see the page and view the source from there when trying to help on something like this. Maybe post a link to a page that has some validation errors but not the page that has the MOST errors

Linda in NY · 03-26-2007, 12:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Taltos

You may not be able to use a tool like that to "fix" your pages. Simple things like a </td> (closing a table data tag) missing will make a page look totally different in IE vs FF. Adding it back can get the same result.

You might post the validation results. Also, you can post a link to the problem pages. It helps to see the page and view the source from there when trying to help on something like this. Maybe post a link to a page that has some validation errors but not the page that has the MOST errors

My friend has responded !!

I'll do that soon, it's every page !! Yikes

What a surprise huh ?

I stink at this stuff, I'll get back to ya in a bit.

Thank you so much,
Linda

chicgeek · 03-26-2007, 01:38 PM

NOT meant to be an "I told you so" remark, but in the future archiving versions of your site would help deal with similar disasters.

Linda in NY · 03-26-2007, 01:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chicgeek

NOT meant to be an "I told you so" remark, but in the future archiving versions of your site would help deal with similar disasters.

NOT meant to be an "I have no idea what you mean", but, I have no idea what you mean

Sorry !

And yes I'm an idiot

Linda

chicgeek · 03-26-2007, 01:49 PM

lol!

When you get this fixed, save a version of the site to disc. A "save-point", if you will, in case something like this happens again.

Linda in NY · 03-26-2007, 02:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by chicgeek

lol!

When you get this fixed, save a version of the site to disc. A "save-point", if you will, in case something like this happens again.

I love your confidence ! When I get this fixed ? I've been putzing around with it since Feb 2006

Thanks for the advice I appreciate it,
Linda

digiweb · 03-26-2007, 08:49 PM

So is the collectibles site the site in question? There's only one copy of the html and it all got trashed?

Linda in NY · 03-26-2007, 09:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CarolineBogart

So is the collectibles site the site in question? There's only one copy of the html and it all got trashed?

Hi,

Yes it's the collectibles site. When I redid all the pages over a year ago, I kept the original files for about 10 months. The pages were faltering before I changed them over.

Redoing everything, page rank started to come back a bit after I renamed all the pages, but now the page rank is gone again. The html doesnt verify well at all on w3c, and I've pretty much disappeared from Google serps, and recently dropped some in MSN search. I'm still going ok in yahoo searches for our products.

In the old days, plug in 1934 Chevy car brochure and we'd come up #1 in google, now were way way down. Our images used to show up in google searches, they are pretty much gone from there too, well over 1000 images.

Now with page rank of 0, who'd want to link to that so I can increase my backlinks. I used to show a good number of backlinks in google, now its under 10. In yahoo its showing over 1500 inbound links. I was just trying to clean things up, thinking even though I submitted a sitemap to google maybe there was a problem indexing or crawling it because of the coding.

All of the oscommerce php pages used to show up in google those are the actual products in the shopping cart, those are what used to come up in google searches for products. Now I'm totally confused.

Thanks,
Linda

digiweb · 03-28-2007, 04:33 AM

The html errors are not too bad but to the search engines they definitely can be, there's a table that's not closed. Get a /table tag in there.

- get a google webmaster account. create an xml sitemap, submit
- fix errors it reports. If you can't you need to get someone to do it because that table tag is a good instance of something that should get fixed.
- if you're allowed point to your site from your ebay site
- buy an ad on craigslist for the link
- this page doesn't end the head section, that's a killer tag to be missing
http://www.cocomilkcollectibles.com/...Brochures.html
- the title tags, content and url re-writes are beautiful
- could stand to beef up the h1/h2/h3
- instead of using google link: use the private one in the webmaster area, shows a lot more

Most important: put every page through the validator. Fix all missing ending tags, whether table, body, whatever. Those are killer because the algorithm gets to the end of file and never sees any content.

Linda in NY · 03-28-2007, 05:35 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CarolineBogart

The html errors are not too bad but to the search engines they definitely can be, there's a table that's not closed. Get a /table tag in there.

- get a google webmaster account. create an xml sitemap, submit
- fix errors it reports. If you can't you need to get someone to do it because that table tag is a good instance of something that should get fixed.
- if you're allowed point to your site from your ebay site
- buy an ad on craigslist for the link
- this page doesn't end the head section, that's a killer tag to be missing
http://www.cocomilkcollectibles.com/...Brochures.html
- the title tags, content and url re-writes are beautiful
- could stand to beef up the h1/h2/h3
- instead of using google link: use the private one in the webmaster area, shows a lot more

Most important: put every page through the validator. Fix all missing ending tags, whether table, body, whatever. Those are killer because the algorithm gets to the end of file and never sees any content.

Thanks for all the advice Caroline,

Help, in the antique car brochure page you say there is no head end tag, I have a </head> that is right after my </style>, is that what you mean ? I am so confused.

I do have a google webmaster account and have a sitemap submitted, it has been for sometime now, many months.

I have a link from the my page in ebay to our site and I try to watermark every image on auctions in ebay with our site name.

google webmaster tools, usually doesnt report any crawling errors except my robots files, I had some things blocked like cookie usage and admin, create account, I unblocked all except admin about a week ago.

The validator sometimes said I didn't end a tag, but at the end of that file I'd see the end tag, guess I gotta work on that some more. I've been doing a css tutorial for a bit now, trying to figure out how to make the pages more css friendly and dumping some of the useless code I have going on.

Thanks for the comments on the Title tags, content and url rewrites, I really did try to work hard on them, my biggest obstacle right now seems to be that dang code.

I'll look into the h2/h3 thing also. Some of my items on some pages I have those, and the validator said they way I had them that they weren't allowed.

I better get a bigger bottle of aspirin and another bigger can of coffee for my coffee maker.

Thanks so much for all the advice !
Linda

digiweb · 03-28-2007, 11:59 AM

OK so I got those validity errors from the html tool at w3.org.

For this page
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...Brochures.html

Here's all the debugging output so maybe it'll be easier to find the errors:
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...00=1&verbose=1

Error 4 is that the head tag is closed but never opened. That's different than what I said, not nearly as fatal.

There's actually nothing wrong with the page. Just change META to meta and it will validate.

Is it possible that the tidy experiment coincided with an increase in competition? Maybe tidy is a lark and the problem is marketing?

digiweb · 03-28-2007, 12:04 PM

That might be it. Competition
http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...ssyauto.com%2F

Linda in NY · 03-28-2007, 12:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CarolineBogart

That might be it. Competition
http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...ssyauto.com%2F

Thanks for all the input again,

You've been a saint ! I'll work on the coding stuff alittle bit at a time, with the two little ones its tricky if you know what I mean. Only had 3 1/2 hrs sleep in the last 33 hrs. Going up to take a nap now.

Yup, my problem has basically been my slide in google. I used to get most of my hits from google and google images, now nothing. Most of my sales seemed to track back to people finding us on google in searches.

So I was going to work on the coding as best as I can, I got our rv trip page, I figure a nonproduct page to start with, got that down from 0 warning and 49 errors to 15 errors in a firefox browser.

I'm thinking when I really get stuck maybe someone here can help me when I post something that won't fix for me.

Would you have any thoughts on why most of our images disappeared from google searches as well. We used to get a ton of hits from google images searches too. When I saw they had disappeared from google searches I added them to my site map for google and marked yes in enhanced image search in the google webmaster section.

One thing I've noticed, when searching one of our products, alot of times, many of the serps results on the first few pages are ebay, which first off pushed me to god knows where and second, the annoying part, doesn't everyone and their brother know about ebay ?? Duh !

Sorry got off on a rant there, thanks again.

Have a great day,
Linda

digiweb · 03-28-2007, 11:21 PM

I'm always taken aback that google lists ebay in my results. If I wanted ebay I'd go to ebay. Thing is, ebay is a gigantic mall, where your site is very specific. I think your site is more relevant by definition.

I think you need a link building campaign. You have an established domain, great content, the html is ok.

Linda in NY · 03-29-2007, 05:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CarolineBogart

I'm always taken aback that google lists ebay in my results. If I wanted ebay I'd go to ebay. Thing is, ebay is a gigantic mall, where your site is very specific. I think your site is more relevant by definition.

I think you need a link building campaign. You have an established domain, great content, the html is ok.

Thanks for all the comments and advice,

Is there a link building forum ? I submitted to a ton of free directories in the past few years, google isn't showing any of them, where they did before I dropped. We don't have the funds right now for paid advertising or high ranking directories with submission fees, darn it.

Maybe I'll just continue to submit, keep adding products and content and some day we will show up again in their serps and visitors will return. We used to do a few hundred auctions a week on ebay, but their fees keep going up and up, and it was getting expensive the times auctions didn't get bids. Then the final value fees, and their cut of paypal as well. That's why I started the website. I got so angry, that we did all the work and they were getting alot of our money. Their space, and name were costing us a good buck.

One good thing, we don't count on the site for paying our bills, but when it made a few bucks it sure helped out, since I'm not working on, and 2 little kids and one bigger kid, and only my husbands income. But what are you going to do, you can't beat city hall. LOL !! I just do without some things I can't afford.

Have a great day,
Linda