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1. Google cannot follow the links using our global image map located on our home page.
2. We use cookie-less session tracking to maintain a user's language preference and allow a user to make use of our inquiry system. Over 25% of our users surf our website without cookies. From my experience, Google does not follow links on pages making use of cookie-less session tracking, nor does Google follow links containing cookie-less session tracking. CFID and CFTOKEN have given us a lot of Google Grief. When we implemented our site search engine, we had to reprogram it to deal with similar problems Google has with CFID and CFTOKEN cookie-less session tracking.
3. Our content parameters are very long. We also have many content parameters that end with "_id."
4. We make use of many parameters for one page of content; our parameters contain product information, content types, locations, and language.
5. We do have a site map, but the link urls on the site map contain the CFID and CFTOKEN cookie-less session tracking tags. Also, the links pointing to our site map contain the cookie-less tracking tags.
We are starting to see Google crawl our site after many years. Some of the "fixes" we have done or plan to do are as follows:
1. Placing a text-link alternative to our image maps and drop down boxes.
2. Removing the cookie-less tracking from the navigation link to our site map. Our site map is in many different languages, so we will have to pass the language variable through the navigation link's url.
4. Our site map will be expanded to include links to every page of the website. The session tracking will be removed from the links in the site map. Each link will have to have a language variable though.
5. I would like to change any parameters containing “id=” , but I will have to find the budget for that. On all new development for the site, we will not make use of “id” in any of our parameter names.
6. I would like to lower the number of parameters used in our urls. I do know you can pass parameters in a directory structure format, but to change to this would be very expensive.
One particular interest to us is the Google Location feature. Our biggest challenge will be making our new Locator compatible with Google Location. Our new Locator allows our customers to find where our products are sold worldwide. Since the locator is for global locations, it makes use of many parameters to narrow down to a location according to product we offer. Also, our Locator makes use of image maps and drop-down boxes to select locations that Google will not be able to crawl through. We will have to make a very large site map to allow text-only location search. It will be also a challenge to seamlessly maintain language state in a text-only location search.
With regards to the locator’s content for each location displayed, we make use of keywords that group many product lines together instead of listing specifically the products sold at each location. Obviously, our website users use Google search on a specific products, and not how we broadly classify those products. We have about 1000 products classified under 5 keywords. I do not know if Google senses the relationship. We will somehow have to place content that is more specific. The problem I am having is that there is not enough room to specifically list the products found at each location.
