Forum Moderators: mack
I have built a database-driven site using .asp and Windows Servers. I usually like to check my search engine saturation using one of the free online tools.
Recently I was happy to discover that Google has listed over 400 of my individual pages. (though they really should be record-sets) So google has actually indexed record-sets and not pages.
Unfortunately only the URL containing the recordset is listed. No indication of the title meta tag, is listed. An example of how it is listed is below:
www.mydomain.com/resultsGallery2.asp?strToyLine_ID=160
Of course if you were to see the above without the title meta tag you obviously wouldn't click on it.
It should be noted that I recently changed the record sets in how data is searched on my site from strToyLine to the above strToyLine_ID, the urls just look a whole lot neater.
The pages containing the old recordsets however, are still listed in google ie; in this fashion:
www.mydomain.com/resultsGallery2.asp?strToyLine=Aura+Battler+in+Action
The reason I changed record sets is because the URL above can be too long and I have an "email this page to a friend" script on my web site and since the URL is so long, some times when the URL is emailed, the end of the URL get's cut off, that is why I decided to change to the recordset strToyline_ID. Making the URL much shorter. (I hope this makes sense.)
Basically I only have three pages, a search page, a results page and a details page, which are dynamically generated depending on what a user inputs into the search. I have even set up recordsets IN THE TITLE METATAG so that the title of the page changes depending on the input search. The string looks like this:
<title>Mydomain: <%=(rsImages.Fields.Item("strToyLine").Value)%> Results Page</title>
So let's say if someone searches for Alien toys the title tag for the page would be "Mydomain: Alien Toys Result Page" The same holds true for my details page as well.
Questions:
1). Is the above considered legal? Is this why my title tag doesn't come up?
2) If it is ok, then why isn't google including the title meta tag along with the URL?
3)How do I fix the problem of google pointing to recordsets on my site that can no longer be accessed?
This whole thing came about because I was noticing that users are visiting the "Results Page" but zero kbytes are actually being downloaded this is telling me that something is truely wrong.
Sorry this is so long and I hope I posted this in the right place because technically while I've been doing this for a year, I still feel like a newbie.
Thanks for reading
Gerry
It is able to list the URL in search results based only on the anchor text (the text used in the link it found) - and perhaps keywords in the URL itself.
Once the page is crawled it will become a full listing.
