Templates and Google

are templates safe to use?

[dan_popescu]

Hi
I'm working on improving my site's design (using MD4), and, since a section of all my pages will look the same I was thinking of creating and using a template. Could using templates negatively affect my ranks in Google?
Please help.
Thank you
Dan

[buckworks]

I have some template pages that rank well for competitive terms, so Google doesn't seem to mind templates as long as each page has enough unique content.

Invest the time to validate and tweak your template to lean, clean perfection before you start replicating it. Remember cross-browser testing, too. In the Top HTML Mistakes thread, someone mentioned how frustrating it can be if a problem gets copied several hundred times!

[Nick_W]

Every site I buils uses templates. No problem. WHy would there be?

Nick

[topr8]

same here i use extensive templates,

generally a different one for each @themed@ section of the site

not had any problems so far.

[bcc1234]

Don't worry about it, I have several sites with thousands of pages each - all are in the index.
Just finished the last one, 2k+ pages on templates and google crawled them all. I'm pretty sure it's going to make it into the index as well.

[Nick_W]

Yes, there's no reason why it shouldn't. Most sites have common elements... what's the big deal?

Nick

[europeforvisitors]

Yes, there's no reason why it shouldn't. Most sites have common elements... what's the big deal?

Plus, templates are just good design--they ensure a common look and feel throughout the site, for easier reading and navigation.

And templates aren't unique to Web pages--they were being used by magazines and newspapers for at least a century before the Web was invented.

[dan_popescu]

Thanks so much. I'm glad to here using templates won't be a problem. They make your work so much easier,and as europeforvisitors pointed out they make a site look better.

Thanks for all the support. You guys are great. I'm still a newbie-can't wait to be able to contribute, not just ask questions.

Dan

[AkanDian rain]

Good question Dan,

I'm a newbie too... but it's the questions that make this work. And besides, I had the same question, and now we both know.

[dan_popescu]

Great. I'm glad I could help. But don't hesitate to ask when you have a question. You'll get enough answers before you hit refresh!

Dan

[dan_popescu]

<<In the Top HTML Mistakes thread, someone mentioned how frustrating it can be if a problem gets copied several hundred times!>>

buckworks
I'm not sure what you mean. Isn't this the great thing about using templates-you can fix the mistake once in the template file instead of having to modify hundreds of pages? At least in MD you can.

Dan

[jatar_k]

I think the point is that if you don't take the time to make sure your template is error free. You can have a broken site, not just a broken page.

It may be easy to fix but if you don't take the extra time in the first place on a tiny little template how long will the broken site stay up there?

[Nick_W]

What's MD?

Nick

[dan_popescu]

MD-Macromedia Dreamweaver

[jaytierney]

Worry about duplicate content, not duplicating the stuff that surrounds it. Templates should be fine...

[Nick_W]

MD-Macromedia Dreamweaver

Unclean, unclean!

;););)

Nick

[dan_popescu]

Nick, what do you mean?

[WebGuerrilla]

Hi Dan,

You can find plenty of information on Dreamweaver in our WYSIWYG and /text Editor Forum [webmasterworld.com]

[mayor]

bcc1234 >> Don't worry about it, I have several sites with thousands of pages each

I'm looking at making a site with several thousand product information pages that are created from a template and I'm worried. Don't search engines try to filter these out because in essence, they become doorway pages?

[Nick_W]

Dan, just joking. I'm a hand-coder ;)

Nick

[ukgimp]

I use Ultra Dev and find the templates feature invaluable. Of course there are common elements in a page like the menus etc which you can ammend in one place and all the page are then updated.

As long as the core content is different and you have made an editable region for titles and metas etc there are no problems.

Take this forum for example it is template driven. It seems to work quite well with the search engines, I think you will agree :)

Cheers

[dan_popescu]

Nick

Joking or not, I took you seriously, and I checked the code of my new template(made in MD). I actually found a few errors that hadn't been detected by MD HTML cleaner. So, good joke:)) Luckily enough I didn't get it.

Dan

Thanks everyone for the input.

[Marcia]

>template pages that rank well for competitive terms

How about the navigation and directory structure on template based sites?

I'm referring to a site with the entire 200 page PHP template based site dumped into the root directory. About 1/4 of them have value as keywords, some highy competitive, and the rest are a waste of page rank. The alternative is to put all of them into a directory called /products/ - I've seen it done both ways, retaining the long URLs with special characters, and while they get indexed, I've yet to see a site like that rank in the top 20 for even the mildly competitive phrases.

I've seen a lot of sites that end up having to rely on affiliates with static sites to bring the search engine traffic. Is there a capability with the template sites to use a divided, hierarchical themed directory structure?

[Nick_W]

Depends how you do your PHP templates ;)

You'd never know that my sites are template based by looking at the url...

Nick

[stuntdubl]

I don't quite understand exactly what you mean Marcia. I've always put my sites all in the root directory (mostly because I think it is most convenient), and I was under the impression that this is in most cases the most beneficial structure to page rank. Is there a reason that this wouldn't be true? I know there have been discussions of this before, could you point me in the direction of the most reliable information on this topic?

If my understanding of your statement is correct....would this mean that pages that WEREN'T beneficial in SERPs (i.e. "un-optimized" pages) would be better to store in a subfolder as to not 'dilute' the pagerank of the root directory?

[Nick_W]

My understanding is tha PR has nothing to do with directories. It's linking.

So if your home page links to

/dir/dir2/page1.html
/dir/dir3/page2.html

etc....

Those pages woould have the same benefit as if your home page linked in the root like this:

/page1.html
/page2.html

Nick

[jatar_k]

>>is there a capability with the template sites to use a divided, hierarchical themed directory structure?

Definitely, using php templates can be done however you want. Poor site structure has nothing to do with the templates, it only has to do with poor structure.

I use php headers, footers and all sorts of included files. Menus that are completely dynamic and the whole nine yards. I can structure any site any way I want. I just use the included files to stop coding repetition and ease of updates. Same premise as using external functions. I reuse as much code as I can.

If you look at the site from the client side it looks like a static site even though it could be including code from all over and could be DB driven.

[Marcia]

It's the linking I'm looking at.

So if your home page links to

/dir/dir2/page1.html
/dir/dir3/page2.html

etc....

Those pages woould have the same benefit as if your home page linked in the root like this:

/page1.html
/page2.html

Nick, my homepage will most likely not link to either page1.html and here's why. Say (to use a fictional example) you have a site with all kinds of stuff for the kitchen. Without checking anything, let's imagine we have serving dishes with 3K searches a month and soup tureens and meat platters with 200 searches each a month,. Lets say that serving dishes is competing against 500K pages and might need PR5 or PR6 to vie for first page, while the soup tureens and meat platters are competing against 50K each, and might only need PR4, possibly PR3 can do. I'm not linking to those from the homepage.

Homepage will link to

/servingdishes/ which will link to

/servingdishes/meatplatters.html and
/servingdishes/souptureens.html

Homepage=PR5 -> /servingdishes/=PR5 -> souptureens.html=PR4

If it's all equally linked up we could have

Homepage=5 => servingdishes.html=PR4 because the PR is so divvied up from the homepage.

Besides, if we dump them all into the root, it makes for navigation that's too confusing for me to manage a site. I did my first ever commercial site with directories like that by accident because I had right hand button navigation (plus text nav with keywords) and there was a limit to how many buttons could go on the page.

stuntdubl, here's the definitive reference on themed site navigation:

[searchengineworld.com...]

If it works by accident for a small beginner's site, it's got to be worth its weight in gold for large sites. PR considerations aside, it's totally user friendly navigation that helps them easily find what they're looking for.

The only question was whether it could be done with a template driven site and apparently it can.

[Nick_W]

I get the point Marcia, I just meant the theory, not the practicality of organizing a site ;)

Nick