Failed to index href with alternative javascript

[ubaldo]

My site has been now indexed by google for quite a while (about 2 months). Way before starting coding, I read many opinions in here about how to make it spiderable by google.

One of the recommendations was to make sure that if you must use javascript (because you want a pop up, or in my case to implement prev/next functionality without storing session data), I should provide a fall back mechanism for the benefit of browser that don’t support javascript and also to be spidered by search engines like google

Here is typical href structure that I’m using on my community site <snip>

<a href="/view/viewPost.php?id=817&lang=2" onclick="on_view_post('817'); return false;">

However, this url hasn’t been indexed even though the home page has a reasonable rank of 5.

You can see href like this everywhere in the site. Here, for example

<snip>

just one hop from the home page

I’ve been banging my head on this one for quite a while now. Any help will be appreciated.

Thanks

[edited by: ciml at 4:36 pm (utc) on Dec. 13, 2002]
[edit reason] No specifics please. [/edit]

[ciml]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, ubaldo.

I suspect that your problem is to do with URLs like /view/viewPost.php?id=817&lang=2 along with relatively low PageRank in the pages that link to those URLs.

You can search for "site:www.domain.com www.domain.com" to see the URLs Google has indexed. Probably the ones with more PageRank (i.e. closer to the home page) and or less complex URLs.

There has been a lot of discussion this problem the site search [searchengineworld.com] will offer many results for something like "google dynamic urls".

[ubaldo]

Thanks for the reply. You’re right, there has been a lot of discussion about the subject but we’re still in the dark, I think. Some people suggest not having “dynamic” urls (with? & in the string) but that’s not an option for a lot of sites (mainly because not everyone can afford content management like applications or dev platforms). To make matters worse, google isn’t indexing a vanilla link (href) but it’s indexing some of my “so called” dynamic url (one with? and & in them). I, personally, resist to believe that empirical evidence that google will try to second guess that a url is dynamic because of? and &.

Has anyone experience noticeable PR improvement by transforming dynamic url like /foo.php?a=1&b=2 into something like /foo/1/2.php (or similar type of transformation).

However, I have made a few drastic changes in my link structure to avoid the use of a cookie that hold language preferences, hoping to get the site indexed in all three languages.

To my surprise, after the change, google now has reverted to a month old version of my home page. I don’t have a clue why. It used to crawl my site every day (my pr is 5).

I’ll be happy to supply the url of the site in question upon request if anyone wants to offer a helping hand.

Nonetheless, I’ll post here the evolution of my case.

Feliz año Nuevo
Ubaldo

[ciml]

I wouldn't expect a PR improvement from loosing "?", "&" and "=" from the URL, but I would expect an increase in the chance of the resource being fetched. Google is improving their crawling of "dynamic" looking URLs all the time, but the PR barrier for crawling remains higher for those URLs IMO.

The reason for Google reverting to a month old version of your home page is almost certainly the Everflux [webmasterworld.com]. You should expect to wait for one or two two full updates for the full index to reflect changes.

We'll be interested to hear how your case evolves.

[silinx]

Hi ubaldo,

While I'm REALLY new to this board and not at all the guru that many of these guys are, I'll chime in on the SE-friendly URLs topic.

My site used to have these horrendously long URLs with three variables being passed a la "page.php?var1=something&var2=something&var3=something". Just this month I surfed the web about Apache mod_rewrite and implemented changes all across the board on my site.

As of last night, instead of just having two pages spidered by Google, I had a BUNCH more picked up. Now, whether this was solely because of my creating more SE-friendly URLs is definitely questionable as I also made a number of other beneficial changes to my site.

But, I have to say that it can't hurt and I that I really think it helped as much as anything else I did.

That's my two cents.

Stephen

<add>While it helped me get more pages spidered by Google, it so far has NOT had any effect on my PR.</add>

[ubaldo]

I said that I’ll keep everyone posted about the evolution of my case (not that it’s very noteworthy ) but I’ll do it anyway.

So, after mayor rearrangement of the link structure of my site mainly to avoid the use of a persistent cookie as a language switch, google reverted my home page cache to a month old version.

After two days I was back in the list of pages that google deems worthy of a daily crawl but the rest of the site’s index is still the old one. This may very well have to do the everflux mentioned before.

We shall see what happens with the overall index. Not bad the 2 day recovery of the home page.

I’m going to wait for the next deep crawl before delving into Apache mod_rewrite strategy because it’s not that easy to maintain.

No that it’s that important, but I use smarty template engine (smarty.php.net). The topic of smarty has come up before here. [webmasterworld.com...]

IMHO. It’s one the best kept secrets of web development. I think it beats XML/XSL or .Net approach in the attempt to separate content from style, mainly because it’s humble yet very powerful. A quick run thought the tutorial should make you fall for it.