Google cruel? Me stupid? Both?

Ever since i've put my website and this blog online i have been trying to figure out how come my website does not get any ranking of significance within Google's search results. The blog did get indexed fine according to Google Alerts. True, i was perhaps too fast throwing the website online, while i was still working on it, but what's going on?  I need people to find my website in order to find projects!

First try

At first i thought that the problems we caused by the fact that I initially denied all indexing by means of a robots.txt file. I did that so i could work on the content, show it to people and modify it until i was satisfied. I assumed Google had visited my website and had cached the indexing rules, therefore not reindexing my finished content. Consequently i tried to remove the site from Google's index and resubmitting it. That was about a month ago, but no luck ...

Then i started looking in the webmaster tool but the only thing that taught me was that Google assumed the site to have no real relevance and that indexing had occurred more than once without errors. So WTF is wrong with my website and why doesn't Google index it?

Then it hit me

I have loads of duplicate content! How dumb! As the website was a work in progress and i ambitiously wanted to have the site online in 3 languages (Dutch, English, Italian) i started of with only English content. I thought that way i would target the bigger audience. the framework i built my website on (built by myself) sports a CMS that is language aware. Culture is passed through the url of a resource. The sore spot seems to be that, if content is not available in the requested culture, the content is returned in the default culture. Hence ... duplicate content!

The plan

I stop postponing the chore of translating my website into Dutch and do it now. Then i'll remove the Italian selection for a while. Wait and see.

I'll inform you of the results in about a month, fingers crossed!

Update (20090202)

I finally figured out the cause. It was NOT Google, but me ... obviously. In Google's terminology it was 'a human error'. ;) The CMS i developed and used for my website, has page level as well as site level settings regarding caching and indexing. Even though i set the indexing to true for all relevant pages, i didn't at a site level. Consequently: true && false = false. Thus: No indexing. I have fixed this issue yesterday and i'm quite sure my site will soon appear in Google's indexes.