What's the Best Way to Get All Your Pages Indexed?

[jlyons1234]

what thebest way to get all your pages indexed? my other pages have PR but i cant find the on google.

thanks
jay

[le_gber]

hi jlyons1234

if you don't have thousands of pages , I think the best way to get them all indexed is to use a sitemap.

Sitemaps are also useful to even the PR troughout the site

hope this helps

leo

[jlyons1234]

I have a site map, but its in a table, does that matter?

[le_gber]

how many pages have you got?

the fact that you sitemap is in a table should't cause any worries to robots.

do you use frames or flash based content?

Leo

[allanp73]

Remember don't put too many links on one page. Keep your site map to less 100 links.
I personally don't use site maps. A site map is used to keep a site to a maximum of 3 levels deep and to help with a user's navigation (but sometimes they can be overwhelming). The same can be achieved by breaking a site's content into themes (I recommend 10-20). These themes would appear as links on every page. Then you further break your site down into sub-themes (I less then 40). These sub-theme links would only appear within their theme pages. So in theory you could have around 800 pages with this design an still maintain 3 levels to the site. Also it is a good way of organizing a site.

[steveb]

Yesterday I noticed a friend of mine had started linking to a bunch of his pages from a key page via a weird menu thing, which to make a long story short, Google couldn't follow the links. This menu thingee was the principal way to find these 50+ pages. They would have been lost completely if Google hadn't found them via his sitemap. Their PR was poor because now they were just linked to from the sitemap that had 100 links on it, instead of also from a page with 50 links on it.

In answer to the title question, make sure all your pages have at least two ways to be found via the crawling bot. If there is only one doorway in, it might be missed sometimes.

[BigDave]

Other than the suggestions about a sitemap, make sure that your regular linking structure can be followed by a bot. Use good old fashioned <a href> links instead of fancy javascript or whatever.

Make sure that all your pages link to many other nearby pages as well as your main pages.

See those links on this page "Home / Forums Index / The Search engine World / ...", those are called cookie crumbs. They are useful for both your users and for spiders. Use them if you can.

Once your links and your linking structure are straightened out, the best thing you can do is to get deep links to some of your content pages that are buried deeper in your site.

Googlebot follows links. If all the external links to your site point to the home page, whatever effort it puts into your site will always be through that one page. If you have several different entrances, it will find all the pages close to each of those entrances.

[GoogleGuy]

<deep voice>Site maps.. GOOOD. Weird linking methods.. BAAAAD</deep voice>

I recommend a tree-like structure where you can always get from the higher levels down to the more specific levels. Other structures work too, o' course, but when in doubt I'd go with a site map and a simple linking structure so that you can reach every page via the root page, or a page that the root page can reach.

[Mike_Levin]

Whenever you launch some new content that you want picked up, try linking it directly off of the main homepage for a few weeks. It's a good idea, in the spirit of "what's new" anyway. If Googlebot starts its travels from the website's root, then any content linked directly from your main homepage has a big advantage in getting found.