News page can't get indexed

need new scripts?

[skunker]

Hello everybody,
I have a website with a "latest news" page that is dynamically updated through a login page on the server. However, I can't seem to get the "news updates" picked up by search engines.

I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions on what script to use to fix this? Paid or free scripts will both be considered.

Thanks.

[Fidget]

Can you post a link to the page here?

[skunker]

Can I? I'd love to....

[encyclo]

Can I? I'd love to....

No, you can't, but can you provide a short snippet of the markup used to call the news page?

Basically, if it's done in Javascript, it won't get indexed. You'd be better looking at using RSS feeds and inserting them into the page.

[mcavill]

are your URL's very complicated - I've got a similar set up on one of my sites, and I link to my latest 3 articles (dynamic URL, but only one variable) from the home page, they are picked up and indexed within a few days....not great if it was breaking news, but hey, I'm not reuters or the bbc yet... :)

Try linking from a page that is frequently visited by google bot and keep the URL simple, could you post an examplified news story URL?

[skunker]

Can you tell by looking at the URL of my individual news page?

[SITE.com...]

Is that a bad URL to have?

Basically I am looking to do another site like this but I don't want to use the same news script if it's going to cause indexing problems.

[encyclo]

&id=

Bingo! Google hates URLs with "id=something" in them, because they look like session IDs - and as session IDs are for individuals, they are not followed by Googlebot because they can't be reused (as they result in potentially broken links in their results).

As they aren't session IDs in your case, you need to look at rewriting the script and replacing "id" with something less obvious.

Also, five variables is a lot, whatever they're called - two or three would be better - or just use mod_rewrite to get some nicer-looking URLs.

[skunker]

hey,
Thanks for your comment. I agree, that's what I thought the problem was...just wanted to confirm.

Well, back to the drawing boards...

[mcavill]

As encyclo said - variables with id in them seem to cause problems (on another site i've got "topic_id" as a variable, PR 0 the lot of them, even though it's not a session id, they perform badly, but I've yet to get around to sorting it out)

If you can, get rid of as many variables as you can, I've only ever seen pages with a max of 3 variables performing well, and anything in the URL that has the letters i and d together - link it them up to your home page for a few days and they should be indexed :)