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First of all, WOW what a resource this is! Can’t believe I’ve been without it for so long :)
A friend of mine has asked me to look at his website as he’s not enjoying any success getting listed on search engines, most specifically Google. It’s an e-commerce site that uses ASP.
Whilst I’ve got several years experience with website design / development I’ll freely own up to being totally and utterly clueless when it comes to search engine optimization. Could someone possibly give me some pointers on what I should be doing / looking out for here?
As far as I can tell part of his problem might be due to the fact that the default page, default.asp, is simply a redirector to shop.asp?CatID=1 (the home category) and doesn’t actually contain any information regarding the site. Should I maybe make better use of default.asp, perhaps preload the default.asp page with the home category information rather than passing a variable?
Having said that I've seen plenty of pages indexed on Google that pass variables in the same way.
To be honest I’m clutching at straws and feel very much out of my depth, any advice would be VERY much appreciated.
[edited by: Woz at 12:34 pm (utc) on May 13, 2003]
[edit reason] no URLs please. [/edit]
I don't know if the redirect will be a problem, but from my experience google is getting better at indexing dynamic URLs.
Is the site not in the google index at all? or is it just ranking badly?
Are you targetting any particular keywords?
One approach you could try to get some search engine traffic is to put up some static 'product focus' pages (if the site has products) which would need to be integrated into your site navigation. Look for product related searches which your users are running, and build pages targetted towards these phrases. These will become 'landing pages' - entry points into your site.
I've had good results from doing this. Its good for your visitors (as long as you provide them with good information) and its good spider food for google.
For the site I run, the majority of search engine traffic comes in on 'landing pages' like this, the home page itself isn't targeted towards search engine traffic at all, its just about info for the visitors and getting accross the company's USP.
build plenty of these pages and then watch your logs to see what other searches you're being found for. Build some pages around these search terms.
added: and By the way, you've found probably the best site on the web for what you need to know. If you spend a lot of time reading here, you'll pick up what you need.
If you're starting from scratch, have a look at this article by Brett: [searchengineworld.com ]
Apologies in advance for going on but here goes . . .
From what I can see the site isn’t in the google index at all. Checking the log for April shows just 2 hits from Googelbot, this compares to 727 for the same period from a far smaller but non-dynamic website I’m running.
The structure of the dynamic site is as follow :-
- Default.asp – uses a response.redirect to go straight to shop.asp?catid=1
- Shop.asp is comprised of 2 includes:
html-top.asp – contains the top half of the html template and also calls 2 includes which build the site’s dynamic menus from the database (1 for categories – all links are shop.asp?catid=x, the other for information pages – all links are info.asp?pgeid=x).
html-bot.asp – contains the bottom half of the html template.
I’ve tried some tests using the spider simulator both with default.asp and shop.asp?catid=1, default.asp forwards fine and the meta information and spider text come back as expected however it doesn’t pick up any of the dynamic links contained in the site’s menus. As a comparison I’ve also looked at other similar dynamic sites using the spider simulator and these return all the associated dynamic links with no problems.
I’m puzzled as to why none of the links from shop.asp are appearing in the spider simulator and thinking that maybe they are hidden too deep, what with being an include inside an include? I would have thought that the spider would only be reading the completed server processed page but maybe I’m wrong?
Issues with picking up the links aside I’m still none the wiser as to why the site isn’t being indexed by Google in the first place.
Addition : I've searched on google for the exact doamin name (eg www.mydomain.com, I searched under google for mydomain) and I do get a list of 38 results, all pages from the site. Unfortunately they're all just the urls, no accompanying text at all, but at some the site is being seen . . . after a fashion :/
[edited by: Jasonn at 8:24 pm (utc) on May 13, 2003]
In that case, the spider won't see them and therefor consider its job done since there's no more links to follow.
could you post an example of one the link code?
The code which generates the dynamic menu links is as follows :
HTML = HTML & "<td width='100%'><a href='shop.asp?CatID=" & CatArray(0, Counter) & "' class='menuLink'>" & CatArray(1, Counter) & "</a><br></td>"
With the fact that these menu links reside in an include which is in turn called by another include (effectively 2nd level) I decided to do some more messing about. It turns out that any link I place in this menu include fails to appear in the spider simulator however if I move the link up one level, into the html-top.asp file itself the link appears with no trouble at all.
So from this it would appear that there's something going on with links in the second level include. Looks like I'll have restrict myself to just 1 level of depth where includes are concerned if I'm to get around this problem.
God I hope this all made sense :)
By the way, probably a silly question but can spiders pick up on links from form submit buttons? :)
I suppose you could try using SSI for the top level includes? I think that may make a difference to the spiders, and you could keep your include structure...
On the subject of not getting indexed by Google at all would invalid HTML cause Googlebot to ignore the pages as has been mentioned?
I only say this because on more detailed inspection of the site's database there seems to be allot of invalid HTML being used for product descriptions etc which would in turn affect any pages on which the information was displayed.
I wonder if there's anyway I can validate this htm input from the client before storing it in the database?
