Google and Subdomains

[muskie]

I've had this site for 8 years Wallpaper Borders Discount, a discount border store and Discount Wallpaper Border at Wallpaper Borders R Us for 7 years. Both have always done very well in maintaining page one positions on Google, Yahoo and other SEs but only for the index (home page). The home pages on both sites are broken down into catagories that are links to subdomain pages that lists and details our products. The home pages on both sites are static while the subdomain pages are dynamic. Some of our subdomain pages are found and get good positioning on Yahoo, but none of our subdomain pages has ever shown up on Google. Never in 8 years. Each subdomain page is optimized on the same basis as the index (home page) only for their particular keyword phrase. It's like Google refuses to acknowledge our subdomain pages exsist. I've thought it's because the pages are dynamic, but they have to be to function properly for our needs. Many of our competitor's subdomain pages are dynamic also, but are found and get good positioning. The people that built the sites are not seo people and have no idea why Google doesn't recognize our subdomain pages. Could someone look at the sites mentioned above and give some insight on what our problem is?
Thanks,
Muskie

[wige]

Looking over your sites, I am not seeing any links on either home page that points to a subdomain, unless I am missing something. The links I see all seem to go to folders under the main domain.

Looking at the links, I did see that many links seem to contain tracking code (&id=) which could cause duplicate content issues and could result in pages not being indexed.

[muskie]

On the thread above "Google and Subdomains" I used the term subdomain when I should have used path or directory sorry. I'm trying to learn.
Thanks again,
Muskie

[muskie]

Wige,
Sense I'm a greenhorn, in what way does (&id=) cause duplicate content?

[alhefner]

Looks like some of your pages are missing meta tags that the search engines can see. I did a manal check of the "kids" page and the meta tags seem to be there but in the wrong format in my opinion.

for example:
You have

<meta http-equiv="KEYWORDS"

where it should simply be:

<meta name="keywords"

Get the "http-equiv" out of tags for keywords and description and just go with the standard

name="keywords"

and

name="description

Ensure that each page has good descriptive text optimized for the search terms you would expect someone to use if they sere specifically looking for that page.

Also, instead of having your description pages URL looking like:
item.php?id=wbd47c.......
change the id to a descriptive thing such as item?id=superman_wallpaper_border
This will help get your pages to show better

I did check to see how many of your pages were actually in any of the search engine indexes. Google has indexed more of your pages than msn or yahoo and all three seem to like your main category pages best such as domain/kids.php and that makes sense because of the friendly urls. As for individual product detail pages, it's a crapshoot!

You have almost 1000 pages total but since they are dynamic pages, making changes that will be more friendly to the search engines could be fairly simple but time consuming.

Do you have a sitemap? Do the search engines know about it?

[alhefner]

Originally Posted by muskie

Wige,
Sense I'm a greenhorn, in what way does (&id=) cause duplicate content?

The (&id=) by itself would not be a problem unless like in the poster's site the following URL information was very similar. On his site, the (&id=) is used to query the database and select a product by record id. Those record id's are all very similar and that could cause a search engine to treat them as duplicate pages.

[wige]

The &id changes on each visit, and is used to identify the session. Google considers the entire URL including the &id= portion when indexing a page. When the spider returns to the site, a new code will be generated by your server for the &id field, causing Google to see a new duplicate of the page each time it visits.

Session variables such as &id should be stored in cookies so that they can remain invisible to the search engines. It will also make it easier for others to link to your content, because they won't accidentally include the &id portion. Also, I should mention that having tracking code in the URL rather than in a cookie can represent a security threat if your shopping cart uses that variable.

[alhefner]

Originally Posted by wige

The &id changes on each visit, and is used to identify the session. Google considers the entire URL including the &id= portion when indexing a page. When the spider returns to the site, a new code will be generated by your server for the &id field, causing Google to see a new duplicate of the page each time it visits.

Session variables such as &id should be stored in cookies so that they can remain invisible to the search engines. It will also make it easier for others to link to your content, because they won't accidentally include the &id portion. Also, I should mention that having tracking code in the URL rather than in a cookie can represent a security threat if your shopping cart uses that variable.

Oh crap! I got a bit mixed up in my previous reply. I was thinking of the product id variable. wige is on target here. And the security issue could very well be a big one especially in cases of payment processing.

Thanks wige for setting this one straight.

[muskie]

Thanks to all for the great info. I have a great deal of respect for all your advice I will be looking into all these sugestions and making changes. I've always thought the dynamic pages were hurting us, but I have to have them. I've also been told I need mod_rewrite to fix the problem.

[apalmer123]

To alhefner, who said:

"I did check to see how many of your pages were actually in any of the search engine indexes. Google has indexed more of your pages than msn or yahoo and all three seem to like your main category pages best such as domain/kids.php and that makes sense because of the friendly urls. "

How does one check to see which pages from a site are indexed?

Thanks
AP

[innominds]

Google doesn't have a special care or hatred towards the sub-domains. If you can get the links to the sub-domain, it will be high on SERPs.