Feature Article: Hide & Seek Search Engines!
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Are You Playing Hide and Seek with Search Engines?
by Mike Banks Valentine
As a search engine optimization specialist, I
see a steady stream of business oriented web sites
belonging to clients and potential clients that
unknowingly HIDE their web sites from the search
engines. Hide and seek! Peekaboo!
HIDING? Yes, you heard me right, I said hiding
from search engines! Let's take a look at a few
of the ways you might do that without meaning
to do so.
Secure Server.
Search engines do have the ability to spider secure
server hosted pages, but often these pages require
either that a visitor fill out a form or log-in
with a password and user name before being allowed
past a certain point. If any page requires filling
out of forms or passwords to reach, search engine
robots will simply leave. They can't log in because
they can't fill out forms, leave email addresses
or enter passwords.
I was contacted by a webmaster for a 4500 page
ecommerce web site. He wondered why search engines
were ignoring such a large site. I asked the URL
of the site and visited the home page. I noted
that upon loading, there was an immediate passing
of the URL http://anybusiness.com site to a secure
httpS://anybusiness.com page. This has two immediate
faults that may be a problem - the forwarding
method and different server. If the instant forward
is by javascript, bad news.
First, search engines often either penalize or
downgrade sites that use immediate URL forwarding,
especially from a home page. URL forwarding suggests
doorway pages (a search engine no-no) or affiliate
URL's forwarding to an affiliate program site,
or the worst of all scenarios, cloaking software
on your server. You may not be doing any of these
things, but the robots don't know, don't care,
and don't index your site, plain and simple.
Secondly, secure servers are very often a separate
web site, meaning that the secure server is actually
a different machine and is an entirely different
site from the non-secure server site unless your
site is hosted on a dedicated server on it's own
IP address, security certificate at the same domain.
This can happen when secure shopping carts are
hosted by a third party host so that a small ecommerce
site needn't purchase a security certificate or
set up complex shopping carts.
For example, if your shopping cart is hosted by
Yahoo stores or other application service providers
(ASP's), pages hosted in the shopping cart don't
reside on your domain and can't be recognized
as pages on YOUR site unless you also host your
domain with the same company. Unfortunately, many
shopping cart ASP's use dynamic IP addresses (IP
address is different each time you visit) and
use database generated dynamic pages.
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So even if you do host your domain with that provider,
search engine spiders have reached another roadblock
in common with any dynamic web site. Dynamic pages
are created "on-the-fly" from information
contained in a database and called for from that
database and inserted into a page template before
being served to the visitor as an HTML document.
The process of serving dynamic pages is not the
problem. The problem is simply that the URL of
those pages contains several characters that either
stop or severely curtail search engine spiders.
Question marks (?) are the biggest culprit, followed
by ampersands (&), equal signs (=) percent
symbols (%) and plus signs (+) in the URL's of
dynamic pages.
These symbols serve as alarm bells to the spiders
and either turn them away entirely or dramatically
slow the indexing of your pages. This is stated
simply in the Google "Information for Webmasters"
page http://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html
"Reasons your site may not
be included.
"Your pages are dynamically generated. We
are able to index dynamically generated pages.
However, because our web crawler can easily overwhelm
and crash sites serving dynamic content, we limit
the amount of dynamic pages we index."
Just because your site is dynamically generated,
creating long URL's full of question marks, equal
signs and ampersands like
www.domain.com/category.asp?ct=this+28that+other%29&l=thing
doesn't mean you are in search engine limbo. There
are simple solutions available for your webmaster.
Here are a couple of articles explaining an elegant
solution called "mod_rewrite".
You can read about that technique if technically
inclined:
http://alistapart.com/articles/urls/
http://alistapart.com/articles/succeed/
This technique is simply creating a set of instructions
for your web server to present URL's in a different
form that replaces those "bad" question
marks and ampersands with slash marks (/) instead.
The method will require that your webmaster is a
bit more technically savvy than most home business
CEO's who created their own web site. Some hosts
will help here by simply turning on the "mod_rewrite"
for shared hosting clients.
Don't play hide and seek with the search engines!
Tell them EXACTLY where to find every page on your
site and if there's any question that they will
find every page on your site, give them a map.
A site map.
Hard code those dynamic URL's for most categories
within the categories of different sections of your
web site into your comprehensive site map. As long
as those dynamic links (even those that include
?=+%& symbols) are hard coded into a site map,
the spiders will follow them. Clearly those 4500
pages mentioned earlier would be too much for a
site map listing. But the main category pages could
be provided for the engines. I visited the site
map page of the webmaster mentioned above and saw
fourteen pages listed on the site map. That explains
why they have fourteen pages, not 4500, indexed
by Google.
How to find out how many pages of your site are
indexed? Go to Google search and type "allinurl:www.domain.com"
without the quotes. Replace "domain" in
the above example with your own domain name. This
query operator will return a list of every page
of your site. Look in the blue bar across the top
of the Google results page and you'll see the number
of pages indexed at your site!
Finally, the biggest hide-and-seek game is played
by web sites with "framed" web sites.
Again, we'll turn to the Google page for the authoritative
word.
"Your page uses frames. Google
supports frames to the extent that it can. Frames
. . . cause problems with search engines, bookmarks,
emailing links and so on, because frames don't
fit the conceptual model of the web (every page
corresponds to a
single URL)."
Owners of framed sites needn't be in search limbo,
they just need to adapt to the search engines. Here
is a tutorial from Search Engine Watch that explains
some workarounds.
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/article.php/2167901
That should do it. Get indexed and stop playing
hide-and-seek!
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Mike Banks Valentine is a Search Engine Optimization
Specialist practicing ethical SEO for Online businesses
http://SEOptimism.com
Learn SEO http://SearchEngineOptimism.com/SEO_Tutorial/
Then Take a Search Engine Quiz to test your Skill
Level
http://SearchEngineOptimism.com/search_engine_quiz.html
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Copyright © 2004 Mike Valentine
This article may be reproduced if used in it's
entirety and the resource box directly above is
included, with URL's set as hyperlinks and copyright
notice included in all uses. Not to be Sold. See
complete usage information at http://website101.com/arch/
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