Links via CGI-Bin are bad for Search Engine Positioning

[Mike Hughes]

I've said this often enough in various threads, but haven't seen a response from actinic so I've no idea if they've taken it on board or when it's going to be fixed.

The problem is that by default actinic creates navigation links that go via the cgi-bin to allow tracking of logged in customers. This is fine for that use, but for customers who aren't using customer accounts (the majority of consumer websites) these links seriously handicap the ranking of the web sites pages in the search engines.

It would be easy for actinic to fix this by creating direct links when customer accounts are not enabled.

Is this on the wishlist and what is the planned release version?

Mike

[missy]

I'd agree with that, think that needed to be said, anything that can be done to make Actinic code more visable/readable to search engines would be good, its largest downfall seems to be its unfriendliness to search engines.

[cdicken]

Hi there.

This is on the wish list and there is a discussion about how to best implement it in future versions.

In the short term, a link to http://your.url/acatalog/sitemap.html within your brochure primary template (Act_BrochurePrimary.html) will give search engines a lot of help to index the site.

[Mike Hughes]

Thanks Chris. This is important as while a sitemap will help Google and the other search engines find the pages, their importance (as measured by the strength and number of links pointing to them) will be an order of magnitude less than they would othewise be. This combined with the reduced anchor text count means all the sites internal web pages will rank poorly for their important keywords.

It also means that those of us who manually create the navigation links to get around it have the headache of keeping track of changing pages, snapshot errors, etc.

Mike