Ecometry/User ID limitation

Beginning SEO question

[Shaggy]

Greetings, I found these Webmasterworld forums through Paul Boutin's article on Webmonkey.

I have been assigned the SEO duties for our firm. We are a jewelry and bead supply company. While we do enjoy great brand recognition, we suffer from very poor search engine rankings.

Having examined our code, I discover that we are handing out the 'blank business card' to crawlers. Our code contains META keywords, description, title and a small bit of Java that calls another page. This is a function of creating our user ID for our Ecometry system (www.smithgardner.com). Apparently this cannot be changed, because this is the only way the program is assigning a user ID. It is also used to pass user ID from page to page.

Please let me know if you see a solution to this problem. What do you suppose is the best way to proceed? Thanks for reading this entire post.

Jeff Manheimer

[IanTurner]

Welcome to WMW Shaggy - Problems we all have encountered with our clients.

Solutions 1 - Get some content on the main page.

2 - If you are using WebDNA tags - move to static pages (webDNA can create these) - potentially IP tag spiders and assign them a special userid - this may be a problem with the cloaking debate that is going on at the moment but check out the cloaking forum for that one.

[Shaggy]

As a workaround, I have attempted to place a link on the index.htm page to a crawlable 'sitemap'. The sitemap has direct links to each of our 10 category pages. We are not interested in a deep crawl of our dynamic content at this time.

I am anxious however, that the search engines will index these direct links and make them available pages through search.

Again, our system requires that the visitors first enter through the index.htm to be assigned a user ID.

[IanTurner]

I think you may have a problem getting good listings with only 10 pages and the USER ID thing!!

[Robert Charlton]

The unique user ID is the problem. I've run into this on a shopping site that used SoftCart... My suggestion to the client, and I was amazed at the amount of resistance I received, was to build a little mini-site for the search engines to see outside the shopping site. This would essentially be a doorway or entrance site, whatever you want to call it, with optimized and interlinked static pages. We never got far enough to consider whether each of the pages on the entrance site could contain a button that would assign you with a user ID.

Once you got your user ID, you'd have to make sure that there were no links back to the entrance site, and you'd have to prevent back button navigation back to the static pages or you'd lose your ID... all do-able, I think, but, again, we never got that far. I've never been able to figure out any alternative.

I don't think the 10 pages would be a problem... I have a lot of 10 page sites that rank very well.

[Shaggy]

Thanks for the sound input.

Upon bringing this to the attention of those that originated the code, and urging reconsideration or alternatives, it now seems like this 'naked' index page is there to create a clean URL (www.firemountaingems.com) throughout the shopping experience and assign a user ID.

Now it appears that we may be able to do away with this, if indeed the world of bead shoppers can deal with looking at 'dirty' url's containing thier user ID and all other manner of ? & $ !

This outcome would make me very happy, and open up our site to spidering. Then onto the wonderful task of writing copy, assigning titles and getting rid of the blasted image map.

Jeff