Is an old-fashioned style index ok?

Is it spam?

[sanblasena]

I would like to put an index into my site - not a site index but more like you would see in a book. I can't seem to find any old style indexes. They all are using searches, which makes sense for a large site. My site is medium sized. It would be an alphabetical index with a list of all the people, places and things talked about in the site, and each one would link directly to the page. For example, John Doe would be the anchor text to the page where he appeared. Is there anything wrong with doing this? I don't want to put the effort into a search right now, but I would like to have some type of index of topics. I don't want to risk having any problems with Google. Another question, when you have this data on a database and do a search, is this stuff indexed by Google? Thanks, Pat

[papabaer]

The W3.org uses such indexes very effectively. In fact, I bookmark the relevant indexes and navigate from there. An excellent example is the index used for the CSS2/2.1 specs. In many ways, this is more more user friendly than a site search, especially when browsing, and the realization that long forgotton terms or phrases have suddenly become familiar again.

- papabaer

[hutcheson]

I have a anthology site in which the content CANNOT be accessed except through one of the index pages. Google seems to spider and index it all.

[Brian]

I can't see any reason at all why you can't do such an index. Google's own advice is not to have more than 100 links on a page, so I guess that's your limit for the number of index entries. To spare yourself any longterm problems, I would think it was best to include some regular text against each entry - so it isn't merely a page of links, as I think it's plausible that Google will someday spot solid pages of links (if it doesn't already) and turn down their benefits. I assume you're not actually expecting anyone to use this index, so your only challenge is to find a place to link it into the site in a way that doesn't look tacky to visitors - which shouldn't be hard.

[sanblasena]

Thanks to all. Maybe I'll give it a try, but I must admit I'm getting a little paranoid these days. Pat