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SE's open my door, but won't come in.

         

nitecoder

9:48 pm on Jun 4, 2001 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I've been racking my brain over this one. Search engines don't crawl past the first page. I have a valid robots.txt, I took out some javascript that was causing the spider sim at searchengineworld.com to not read past my meta tags, and I totally redesigned my site to use cookies for session tracking instead of passing a token around on the URL.

After doing all that, I thought surely everything would be fine. Well, along comes Slurp last night, and same exact thing. It hits the home page and nothing else.

Can anyone help me with this? I'm at a loss.
Url in profile. NFFC

DaveAtIFG

6:03 am on Jun 5, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Welcome to WmW nitecoder! I have a couple ideas. First, is impatience an issue? When I bring a new site online, I do a "routine submission" to all the major SEs, ODP, and LS, and then ignore the site except to verify the directory listings for about two months. It seems to take a new site a while to "gain respect." I suspect it's a combination of spidering/indexing delays and acquiring a few incoming links.

Another idea is you may have inadvertantly sinned. I didn't spend a lot of time studying the code but you may have some same color text and background issues. You define a background image for the page in the <body> tag but no background color. I believe the default color is white so you could be getting punished for white on white text.

Slurp operates in his own mysterious ways and is not a good measure of spiders as a whole. Other then the possibility I mentioned above, I think the site as it now exists should do fairly well in the SEs. But it takes time, directory listings, and links.

nitecoder

10:32 pm on Jun 5, 2001 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Thanks for the response, it was very helpful.

I prefer to think of it as "a sense of urgency" rather than "impatience". :-)

I'll fix the bgcolor thing, no problem.

I'm also struggling with an <H1> issue. I have a graphic header "We Monitor Web Sites...". I don't much like the graphic and will be replacing it with one I do like.

But, I also have another "headline" below it in text in an <H1> tag, for no other reason than I've read I'll be doomed in the SE's without it.

I hate having both, it's very redundant no matter how I try to phrase it, but I really don't want to give up the graphic (or its replacement).

Help?

DaveAtIFG

4:20 am on Jun 6, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Check out some current top ranked pages, I don't think <H> tags have been the "hot ticket" for quite a while at most SEs. <font size ="2"><b>Seems to work better most places presently.</b></font> Also, leading off with your text, instead of your graphic is probably a better idea. Unlike a few years ago, I think of search engine friendly page design as one of three main factors for good rankings. In descending importance:

1. Listings in the right directories (= high quality incoming links)
2. Substantial on topic incoming links (50+, varies from SE to SE)
3. Page design

>but I really don't want to give up the graphic
If you can't get traffic any other way, eliminating the graphic will look better and better, I promise! ;) Alt tags my offer some help, particularly on a leading graphic.

WebGuerrilla

7:34 am on Jun 6, 2001 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>>I'm also struggling with an <H1> issue.

The easiest way to deal with the <h> vs. graphic is to use CSS to instruct the browser not to display heading tags. The spiders will find it, but humans won't see it.

Aaron

8:40 pm on Jun 6, 2001 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I totally agree about patence..

My website was never really well designed to maximise keyword density and stuff.

.But because of a friendly ODP editor , I got into google quite quick and highly ranked..

I had horrible rankings in other Search engines though, but recently after about 4 months, I find my ranking rising in Altavista and Lycos. Just when I almost gave up and did nothing..

I guess the only "SEO tactic" I ever did was to get people to link to me.
or search for "add URL automatically" websites on google to add my website :) . Though I read, that links added this way are probably not very valuable anyway..

Anyway that takes time for this tactic to work..

Someday though, I'm going to build one website from the scratch based on the sound principles I learnt here..