Are you a member of the Invisible Web Club?
Despite the increasing use of search engine friendly URLs, custom meta tags and cleaner navigation, there's a lot of web content out there that is inaccessible to the search engines.
Perhaps it is in the "too hard basket" for many designers. In which case, perhaps you need a new designer! After all (repeat after me) You Are the Customer.
There's a nice article from SearchEnginePosition.com that discusses the topic: The Invisible Web Still Exists
Too many websites are not search engine friendly or are not properly optimized; in other words, are active members of the Invisible Web Club.
How do you get out of this club? I'm glad you asked:
- Rewrite "dynamic" URLs to remove question marks, ampersands, and equals signs from them
- Remove frames if you have them
- Don't have links that rely on JavaScript to function
- Don't embed navigation elements in Flash or Java
- Provide alternate link-based navigation to content that is behind search boxes or fill-in forms (that includes JavaScripted pulldown lists!)
3 comments
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Stephan, can you extrapolate on the first point some more? Is it that some search engines don't index dynamic pages like this at all, or is it a matter of degree?
I ask this thinking about my own blog for example where I have never bothered to set up decent URLs, but it still seems to get indexed pretty well (by Google atleast).
Interested to know more.
CheersComment by Charles [Visitor]
· http://www.surfarama.com —
02/08/06 @ 23:49
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Charles, in general, search engine robots have a hard time indexing pages with too many dynamic variables, such as = ; + ; ? ; ids and so on. My client has a site with too many = signs (2 is too many for me) and Google never indexed these pages.
It's so easy to do a mod rewrite that it's really worth it.Comment by Nadir [Visitor]
· http://www.seoprinciple.com/ —
02/10/06 @ 20:41
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Hi Charles. It's a matter of degree. Different search engines have different tolerance levels for dynamic URLs. Google engineer Matt Cutts recently advised at the Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose that you're safe with 2 or fewer parameters in the query string. Unless one of those two variables is named id (or something else resembling a session ID), in which case all bets are off. By the way, he also recommended keeping the values of those parameters to fewer than 5 digits.
But that's just Google. Rather than having to worry about each search engine's tolerance levels for dynamic URLs, I find that it's best just to remove all signs of the page's dynamic nature from the URL. In other words removing all question marks, ampersands, equals signs, cgi-bin, user IDs, and session IDs from the URLs. That's because static URLs look infinitely more palatable to the spiders, as the risk is minimal that they will get caught in up in a "spider trap."
Furthermore, not only does a clean, simple URL eliminate the potential problems that you could have with getting that page indexed, but, as a bonus, you're also more likely to garner more "deep links" from other sites (i.e. links directly into one of your pages deep within your site) because the URL looks user-friendly, stable, and easy to copy-and-paste (into a web browser, email message, or web page editor).Comment by Stephan Spencer [Member]
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02/12/06 @ 23:25
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