Announcement

**pinbrook** · 02-Jan-2003, 10:45 PM

if you are running business, then search engines can go no further than the login page.

Think about it....if you only allow logged in people to view your pages how can you expect a search engine to log in?

**theglowcompany** · 03-Jan-2003, 12:02 AM

Jo,

I am using catalog not business.

help!

**pinbrook** · 03-Jan-2003, 01:12 PM

Ok, I can't help with the NOLOGIN bit, thats what I saw and assumed business....heres some ideas to get around the problem

have you tried submitting the acatalog/index.html to the search engines

another good page to submit is sitemap.html ....it provides all the links to all your pages! (tell catalog to create the page even if you don't use it)

try putting links on more pages to acatalog/index.html, thus giving the spiders more opportunities to find the products

**theglowcompany** · 04-Jan-2003, 11:05 AM

Thanks Jo, I will submit these to the SE's.

What I have done however is use a fragment to create a text link to the main catalog index page - I cant believe that Actinic have overlooked this one - it is crusial that the Actinic sites are spider friendly - after all that is the main battle.

Thanks again

James

**pinbrook** · 04-Jan-2003, 11:52 PM

In my experience Actinic pages are very search engine friendly...

Although I tend to

1 strip out all the comments and unnecessary code to create a clean page
2 make sure every page has a keyword in the title (this happens when you call your sections by the name of the products within the section
3 have a unique description for every page
4 include about a dozen keywords to each section ensuring that these keywords are present in the page

i also tend to submit the root index page, the catalog index page and the sitemap.

and make sure I have an inbound link from at least one site with good page rank which is already indexed by google.

**theglowcompany** · 05-Jan-2003, 02:34 PM

Thanks for the tips Jo - I'm just starting to understand how to SEO. What is the full address of the site map? & is the root index the home page?

Thanks Again Jo

**pinbrook** · 05-Jan-2003, 06:09 PM

I would expect the path names to be as follows

www.yourdomain.co.uk/index.htm

www.yourdomain.co.uk/acatalog/index.html

www.yourdomain.co.uk/acatalog/sitemap.html

**BPJSURF** · 07-May-2003, 12:47 AM

I just did some search engine research, I hope this will help you.

Brian

Meta Robots Tag

One meta tag worth mentioning is the robots tag. This lets you specify that a particular page should NOT be indexed by a search engine. To keep spiders out, simply add this text between your head tags on each page you don't want indexed. The format is shown below;

<HEAD>
<TITLE>Page I Don't Want In Search Engines</TITLE>
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX">
</HEAD>

You do NOT need to use variations of the meta robots tag to help your pages get indexed. They are unnecessary. By default, a crawler will try to index all your web pages and will try to follow links from one page to another.

Most major search engines support the meta robots tag. However, the robots.txt convention of blocking indexing is more efficient, as you don't need to add tags to each and every page. If you use do a robots.txt file to block indexing, there is no need to also use meta robots tags.

The meta robots tag also has some extensions offered by particular search engines to prevent indexing of multimedia content.

there is more>>>>

Robots Exclusion
Sometimes people find they have been indexed by an indexing robot, or that a resource discovery robot has visited part of a site that for some reason shouldn't be visited by robots.
In recognition of this problem, many Web Robots offer facilities for Web site administrators and content providers to limit what the robot does. This is achieved through two mechanisms:

The Robots Exclusion Protocol
A Web site administrator can indicate which parts of the site should not be vistsed by a robot, by providing a specially formatted file on their site, in http://.../robots.txt.

The Robots META tag
A Web author can indicate if a page may or may not be indexed, or analysed for links, through the use of a special HTML META tag.

The remainder of this pages provides full details on these facilities.

Note that these methods rely on cooperation from the Robot, and are by no means guaranteed to work for every Robot. If you need stronger protection from robots and other agents, you should use alternative methods such as password protection.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Robots Exclusion Protocol
The Robots Exclusion Protocol is a method that allows Web site administrators to indicate to visiting robots which parts of their site should not be visited by the robot.
In a nutshell, when a Robot vists a Web site, say http://www.foobar.com/, it firsts checks for http://www.foobar.com/robots.txt. If it can find this document, it will analyse its contents for records like:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

to see if it is allowed to retrieve the document. The precise details on how these rules can be specified, and what they mean, can be found in:

Web Server Administrator's Guide to the Robots Exclusion Protocol
HTML Author's Guide to the Robots Exclusion Protocol

The original 1994 protocol description, as currently deployed.
The revised Internet-Draft specification, which is not yet completed or implemented.

**Mike Hughes** · 07-May-2003, 08:23 AM

It's essential that you provide a path for the search engines to follow so they can crawl your site.

With Actinic the thing to do is have a sitemap link on your front page (it doesn't have to be highly visible, I usually just use a text link at the bottom of the page). This way they know that your front page links into the other pages so your google pagerank will be properly distributed across your site.

Don't just submit the sitemap page as if the other pages aren't linked to somehow from the front page then the pagerank of your front page won't get distributed to your other pages and you'll do badly on keyword searches.

Mike

**pinbrook** · 07-May-2003, 10:57 AM

Search engines are only picking up my front page and not any of the other pages. After running a Spider simulation at the spiders find this link & go no further

This is an issue that Actinic ought to fix.

I have had the same problem with this. When this was first posted in Jan I hadn't experienced the LOGIN link, but several months later the issue has manifested. If a client with an exsisting site comes to me for search engine optimisation, I change this link to a simple

http://www.doamin.co.uk/acatalog

After my very complimentary comments to Chris Barling about how SE friendly catalog is....this needs to be fixed!

**theglowcompany** · 07-May-2003, 08:05 PM

Well after typing a lengthy reply - & being promted I put too many images in I lost my post!!!!!

Synopsis -

Thanks all who have replied

Actinic please fix!

Can anyone help guide me to ensure each main catagory can be indexed from front page - I think as per how Mike described.

I'm not experienced in HTML

Please have a look at my very messy front page that has the links positioned by my web host & are lost every time I update

Help

Please help

Thanks!

**cdicken** · 08-May-2003, 10:21 AM

Thanks for the comments. I will pass these on to the team right away.

**Mike Hughes** · 08-May-2003, 02:35 PM

James,

I had a quick look at your site and the error a spider will get is from the link on your photo and the 'here' link on your new 'glow stick' product.

The rest of your links look fine and will be indexed by the spiders but these links are seriously wrong.

The link on the photo is taking visitors to "http://community.actinic.com/acatalog/EL_Wire_Glow_Wire.html" ???

The link on the 'here' text is creating a general script error.

I don't think you have a major problem. You just need to fix these 2 links. I would tell you how, but I never use the CGI-bin to go to products I just hard code the link with the target destination.

Mike

**theglowcompany** · 08-May-2003, 05:30 PM

Thanks Mike, I'll look at those.

But this does not fix the problem that the links that I have put on the front page e.g 'glow to...' do not actually work (although they do have a link in the fragment) & are put in place by my web host every time I update - otherwise the spiders dont pick the links up - this is the real issue

This as you can imagine is causing serious problems as I am limited to the number of updates I can do

I havnt had any reply that explains or fixes this problem. I do not actually want the 'glow to..' links on the site - they are just there so that my web chap can put links behind them without getting 'baned' by any SE's

James

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