Problems indexing aspx files.

Some easily indexed, others not at all...

[Susanne]

How come pages looking like this are indexed in Google:

www.mysite.com/EN_MagazineArchiveLetterFromTheEditor.aspx?issue=august2002

but pages like this aren't:

www.mysite.com/EN_MagazineArchiveArticle.aspx?id=divingsafari

This is an online magazine with new articles every month, plus other new pages. Not a single article has been indexed since launch 6 months ago but ALL other pages have. I'd REALLY appreciate some help and input about this. There's only one difference between the pages. The word "id" in the parameter of the non indexed pages. Many thanks.

[Marcia]

No idea Susanne, but that id= looks an awful lot like it could be an affiliate landing page with an identifier. Can you rewrite the URLs to look static?

[Susanne]

Thanks Marcia, I would never have though of the affiliate connection. Very interesting point. Yes, I suppose we could change the URLs, at least so that they look the same as those already indexed.
If anybody else has any theory, please post. :) Cheers!

[andreasfriedrich]

I can only enforce Marciaīs point. It has been mentioned around here a couple of times that you might want to avoid id as a parameter name. The SEs might choose not to index those since the id might indicate session ids, affiliate ids, the primary id of a database, etc. All those run the risk of filling up the SEīs index with garbage or whole databases.

Just like you take care to implement a nice looking and useable UI for your website you should take the time to implement a user and SE friendly URI name space. Itīs not hard and certainly worth the effort. Remember, cool URIs donīt change [w3.org].

Andreas

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Please stop posting these kind of questions. You make me sound like a preacher man on a mission to seek the the sick and the lame URIs and as if who gets there first, the (mafia man)/SE or me is uncertain ;)

[Gringo]

Yet URL's with affiliteid as a parameter are indexed with no problems at all. Try searching for this ...

allinurl: affiliateId

[rmjvol]

allinurl: aspx?id=

gives 138,000 results.

So obviously, "aspx?id=" isn't a hard and fast rule for keeping Googlebot away. Then again...

Interesting Observation of the Day:

My client uses "id" with both letters lower case. A quick scan looked like zero of the 138,000 results used lowercase "id." A closer inspection shows exactly 2 pages in the top 1000 that use the "id" all others are uppercase "ID" (about 95%) or the I is upper case "Id"

Seems like it would be trivial. But as I'm not the resident techie, can someone comment on the potential for G taking into consideration the case of the "I" & the "D" when they decide what to index?

Think I'll go poke around those 2 pages a little more.

rmjvol

[Susanne]

Wow, interesting! Thanks for the info rmjvol. Looking forward to more wise insights from you while I do some poking as well.