Search Bots won't crawl my site!

page redirects driven the bots off?

[houseofstrauss]

I have a new site with 260 pages. All of them are designed to be viewed in an iframe on my home page. I got the redirect code from one of the experts here and have to say it works really well redirecting any url t5o the home page and loading it in the approprate iframe in context. EXCEPT, i think it has driven the search bots away. I know google has visited the index page and gone no further. I'm really pleased the way the site works, but this is a real setback. Can anyone help. Here is the redirect code that's in every page except the index.

if (top == self) location = "http://mysite.com/index.htm?ifr=if2&ifrloc=" + escape('the page to be displayed.htm');

if1 and 2 are iframes in the index page.

Thanks in advance, Richard

[panic]

From what I understand, Google doesn't read the contents of Iframes.

-p

[Jim_Six]

Hi,

One thing you could try to test that theory is linking to the physical URL of one of the pages you'd normally display in your Iframes. it may be that the googlebots are not aware of existence of your 'sub' pages. After a few weeks see if the bot has crawled the subpages.

If that is your problem you could maybe link to an internal page with a list of the URL's of your subpages - that way users could still take advantage of your iframe setup and it would be setup in a google friendly manner.

Hope this is helpful - let me know how you go.

Regards,
Jim Smith

[edited by: tedster at 6:24 pm (utc) on Nov. 20, 2003]
[edit reason] clipped url from sig [/edit]

[houseofstrauss]

Thanks for your suggestions. I could easily make a page with all my saite pages listed, so how do I create an internal link from my index page to this hidden page ( I dont want visitors to see it, only robots)

Also from what you have written, I think you are suggesting that the redirect code IS OK with the robots? is that the case? I submitted my site to a number of S/Es, but none of them have crawled the site.

Thank-you for your help here.

[panic]

I think the best way to go about it is just get rid of the iframes. It's just cleaner without iframes, and iframes can't be viewed in non-Microsoft browsers.

-panic