SEO and CGI-BIN, MSN Submit-it

[Sally Dickson]

Quote: " routing through the CGI-BIN stops search engines dead in their tracks. "

I have been using MSN Submit-it and Position Manager to optimise my shop.

Currently some of the pages scare 60-70 on MSN (a reasonable score), but stubbornly score 0 on Google.

I read somewhere that I need to make a change to the CGI-BIN, but I can find no further posts on this subject.

I welcome any comments.

[Mike Hughes]

Hi Sally,

Your navigation uses direct links rather than using the cgi-bin so the cgi-bin isn't causing you any problems.

Your problems with google (and yahoo) is that you don't have any (or any important) links to your site from other sites.

The quickest and easiest way to get going is to get listed on Yahoo and DMOZ. This will get you noticed by google and they will then come and index your site.

After a month or so, Google will also assign you some visible pagerank at which time you can start to seek reciprocal links with other sites. Tiggypig (an actinic user and member of this forum) for one is probably a good match and worth exchanging links with.

The reason most sites won't exchange links until you have some pagerank is that google doesn't like to see links to banned sites and the only way to recognise a banned site is a blank pagerank. Note that just because you have a pagerank of zero doesn't mean your site has been banned, for new sites it's just that google doesn't count your site as worth ranking until you have a few links to your site.

Mike

PS. Your creative catalogs front page has a great big missing image at the centre. It's been like this for a while and you should really get this fixed.

[B_Online]

Just to add to what Mike has already pointed out to you, the image he is referring to is not the only image missing (2 more on Case_Studies.htm)…these images will be visible to you, but are not visible online…that is because the images are on your C drive and have not been uploaded, you need to put all your images inside your site1 folder and change the path to them and upload again.

I also noticed that all your pages on the Creative Catalogues site have no ‘Title’ names…this is very important to search engines and you would score far better if you had relevant title names for your pages also use ‘ALT’ tags on all your images by placing keywords text and be careful not to repeat words in the ALT tag

[Sally Dickson]

re. Creative Catalogues

Thanks for these comments.

I will put some hours in on this site, which I have somewhat neglected.
So keep the comments coming, I had sent emails requesting feedback to a couple of friends for comments, but...

So thanks.