Site search results in Google

[FrazerPart]

Hi All.
I've asked three different people the same question and ended up with three different answers!

Now it's your turn!

We are getting some strange results in Google.

Why do our destination URLs always reference a “cgi-bin” address and not the actual URL? (On click through, you do end up on the correct page)

See the screen shots. Do you have any idea why this is happening?

A competitor site, who is also using Actinic v9 doesn't have the same problem.

Has anybody got any ideas?

Max

[Mike Hughes]

What's happening here is that Google is showing what it believes to be the most relevant page from your site and is finding the page via a link that actinic has generated (from the 'also bought', 'best seller', 'new products', etc links).

Actinic creates these links via the cgi-bin so they can keep customers logged in when customer accounts are used. As there's no log-in being used, the scripts are redirecting to the original page which is why the url looks normal when you see the page.

The '#product reference' is used at the end of the link to tell the browser where to find the product on the page when pages have more than one product.

This is all normal and not a sign that anything is wrong.

The main problem you have is that your navigation links are not very effective and as a result Google is prioritising the few pages it finds via the actinic generated links.

To explain this it's important to understand that google rates pages on their content (i.e. what's on the page) and their authority (how strong the links to the page are). In most cases (there are a few exceptions) the more links a customer has to click to get to a page from the home page, the weaker the authority of that page will be.

In this case to get to the page in question, the navigation goes:

Homepage > 944 parts > New Porche 944 parts for sale > 944 body parts and spares > 924, 944 bonnet hood gas damper strut.html

The first page in the navigation is a dead page and doesn't achieve anything other than weakening the authority of the pages below it.

You can stop google from following the cgi-bin links but I wouldn't do this in your case because the next best page google is likely to show will not be ranking as well.

The best thing to do is:

1. get more links to your site to boost the authority.
2. remove wasteful dead pages from your navigation.
3. If the cgi-bin links still annoy you then you can stop them by blocking google from the cgi-bin using a robots.txt file.

Mike

[FrazerPart]

We set our site up the way it is so that it is easy to navigate through the online catalogue to find what they are looking for.

What have other people done in the past to improve their site navigation structure?