Basic SEO Troubleshooting - Getting Through
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Web designers love to add all sorts of “interest” to a web site with lots of flair and flashy features. Menu links based on JavaScript or Flash make search engine spiders choke; they can’t crawl past them. Likewise, they can’t crawl to pages that aren’t linked to something, so you should make sure that every page on your site can be reached from at least one static text link. Dynamic URLs are also an issue sometimes; you’ll want to check Google’s most recent guidelines on those. It used to be true that search engine spiders couldn’t crawl them at all; now they can, at least to a limited extent.
You can make Google’s work even easier by submitting a sitemap. Do it in XML, and keep it up to date. You can find the details for how to do this here; the page lists the protocol and explains how to submit your sitemap. Keep in mind that your sitemap should not be larger than 100 links. If it is larger than 100 links, you will have to break it up into more than one page – and you can include another page on your sitemap that links to both of those pages, so Google can keep crawling. Incidentally, if possible, you really should have less than 100 links on each page of your web site as well.
Speaking of your site’s structure, you might want to take another look at it, especially if you’re not using a template. Cookie cutter templates may look boring, but GaryTheScubaGuy (aka Gary Beal) cited one possible reason to at least create and use your own unique template: it may help keep Google from seeing very little or duplicate content on your site and then backing out. He notes that this is rare, but he has seen it when a novice builds a site one page at a time with no template. “In a correctly built site most robots will parse the template and crawl the content and see unique content. This allows them to crawl deeper and faster,” he explained.
Sometimes it’s a matter of patience. If the site is fairly new, Google simply will not have gotten around to indexing all of it. If you’ve recently purchased a site that has been around for a while, you’ll want to consider what was on it before. If the site has undergone a serious redesign, has the domain or subject of the site changed, or remained the same?
Is your site an affiliate site? Or does it link to an affiliate site? Those have their own special issues, which are beyond the scope of this article. I can say that avoiding duplicate content is particularly tricky for affiliates.
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