Forum Moderators: open
OK, onto the situation. I have an idea that although the case is mine, the general concept is relevant to a lot of newbies like me.
I am involved with a site that has a PR of 6. It has minimal or no SEO (i.e. graphics instead of text links, no real keyword focus, some even some alt tag stuffing etc. etc.). The site, as part of its offerings, has a database of 4000+ CVs. We've created unprotected web pages for each of these CVs. Basically these "flypaper pages" are the full CVs of folks but we've stripped out their contact details. The pages do however have everything else so they are valuable content for users to choose the CV they want. They are public domain and so should provide lotsa good mulch for Search Engines. The problem is that I am not sure if google and the rest are going to pick them up.
The home page has a dynamic scrolling box with 20 different text-strings/URLs. (If interested box can be seen at bottom right of the URL in my profile). From there you go to 1 of 20 related .asp pages.
Each of these 20 pages are heads of sections that have the summaries of 100 to 1000 relevant CVs. Each of these 4000 CV summaries link (via a button) to the contact detail free version of the CV. It is the contact detail version free pages that I want search engines to pick up. I've done a sample page (with minimal actual optimisation) and it has show up as 1 in a few three word searches. The pages need to be optimised better and that's being worked on now. The problem is though that people search on these CVs on 3-4 words with millions of permutations so it is a balancing act (i.e. CV is important, 5 major sectors and some geographies but after that it is free game for almost any word that could be in the CV).
It is pretty hard to explain this without actually using specific examples but I hope it makes sense.
Oh, and one more thing. It ends up being well, well over 10 Mb.
So my question is will google actually work it's way through these links and index these flypaper pages?
Any feedback appreciated,
Tigrou
Either
1. rewrite the scrolling mechanism so it picks up the URLs from a TABLE on the page which Google can see - you could hide the table from users by using a hidden DIV
2. have a <NOSCRIPT> section in your page which give the URLs hard-coded.
3. have a link to a site map which has the URLs hard coded
If you did any of the above things then Google would start to work its way though the CVs.
A delayed thanks for your help. Yah, we've now created pages that each index a portion of the 4000 CVs. Problem is that now Google has indexed these intermediary pages without going to the 4000 CVs. Not sure why as each CV is very individual, even if it does follow a standard format.
Google now revisits these indexing pages every 2 days. We've made some changes to them that will hopefully allow the CVs to be indexed on the next deep crawl.
Tigrou
