new seo challenge

[richone]

Hi

I'm working on a ecommerce site and our products are dynamically generated into the shop via a database - so there's obviously a problem with the search engines reading the content. Therefore, the software company that built the platform has cunningly development a marketing plug-in (at a high price to it's customers) that creates static html pages (with meta tages) from the content that is already stored on the existing website pages and exports them into an index file - the purpose is to enable the spiders to crawl these HTML pages and index them. So, if a person seaches for a partcular product that is within our store, this should automatically bring up the product HTML page within the search result (many of the products aren't sold on a large scale). Once a person clicks on the search link, they come through to the html page which then refreshes leading them to the webpage within the main site - i.e. to the dynamically generated webpage.

This plug-in has generated over 100 html pages into a directory of links and all I need to do is submit the directory link to google and other search engines which will then come and crawl all the links within the directory and index the pages.....easy stuff. However, it's now been 6 weeks since I submitted the links to google and still nothing - After this long winded email - is there a problem with this and how do I get google to crawl these pages and index them. The link I have to submit is http://www.mycompany.com/isroot/myc...talogindex.html Which as you see is a catalogue index file. I also have another for a product idex file.

If this isn't too confusing, can anyone help steer me in the right direction.

[jestep]

Submitting to google, will do nothing. You need to get inbound links into your site, and you will be picked up in a short time. Usually within a week. Also, search engines can spider dynamic links in most cases. If you have a static url for each page, you might want to make a sitemap or a page that lists all of the links so the search engine will find it easuer. Usually a search engine, will index your first page, and then will start to index the rest of the site a 1 - 2 weeks later.

[richone]

we have inbound links (31) and the site ranks first page in google for two of our keywords. However we can't build up a page rank because this aspect isn't seen by the search engines - It just redirects to a dynamic page with exactly the same content on. Have a look

the main domain is www.italianwinesdirect.com one of the links I'm meant to submit is http://www.italianwinesdirect.com/is...ductindex.html

It might make it easier to understand if you can see it. Try clicking on one of the links and see what happens.

[jestep]

You might try using a 301 perminant redirect. when you get links to the page, you should link to the page that the site redirects to this will give the PR to that page. Also the frames are definately not going to help. The subpages will never have any different page rank as long as you are using frames.

[HardCoded]

Yeah, that redirect off the front page of your site is freakin brutal. Don't do that. Don't even do a 301. Your content is now in a different place than many of your inbound links will be, whether you like it or not.

The frames are not going to help you either.

[jestep]

I think as far as the SE's are concerned, you need to move the opening page to the root directory, so that you dont have to redirect.

[richone]

tell me about it - we inherited the frames when we took over the site and the frames have to stay for the time being because it's too much work at the moment to change them.

The redirect is part of the software and I agree it is fairly minging but theres nothing we can do about it. What do you mean "Your content is now in a different place than many of your inbound links will be, whether you like it or not. "

Ok - I know I have to get rid of the frames - not an option for the time being. We could make this the site map and link it from the homepage - as you suggested but would this work to make the spiders crawl and index the pages?)

Or what else - This solution by a major software developer was meant to be fool-proof and a good solution to overcome the problem of dynamic content. Are they right or just talking bxxxxlox

[HardCoded]

Personally, I think they were talking BS.

Looks like an 'expensive' system, but that redirect off the front is definitely going to hurt you.

I was looking at an example the other day in DMOZ

http://www.dmoz.org/Regional/

It's the only top-level DMOZ category with outbound links in it. That page has high page rank, and passes lots of it on to the pages it links to....except for two poor guys who do a redirect off their front pages: DMO and Commonwealth Secretariat. They each get a big, fat zero for pagerank.

[richone]

so your suggestion is to ditch this plug-in and get rid of the frames and try optimise the site as best we can so that it reads the rest of the content?

It's ok, I won't hold you to it...much :)

[HardCoded]

Yes.