Google and ASP

[Psychobel]

We've been doing a fair bit of work on a site

Must Have Security

We retro engineered the code so that Doc Type was properly declared, so that the menu should be crawlable, so that Headers were rendered as Headers as opposed to images and we deployed a Google Site Map.

However, a couple of weeks on and Google still isn't indexing the site properly. In fact only 4 pages indexed and one of those is "old"

Could this be something to do with ASP and the way the URLs are formed? Unfortunately ASP is one of our skills and we're a bit stumped at the moment.

[google junky]

There is nothing wrong with ASP in Google that I know of.
I checked a lot of things and couldn't find anything wrong on your site itself, so I'm left to tell you that you need a links strategy.

Yahoo and Google show next to no links from other sites to yours. Possibly your site is not deemed as important or popular enough.

A link which isn't a direct link from
mobile-phone.virtuous.co.uk/phone/camera_cellular_phone.php

A link from an IFrame news page.
http://www.alloi.net/iframe_news.asp

2 or 3 miscellanous sponsered ads showing up as links back to you from dogpile and uk.nextag.com

Start getting backlinks. A few a week would be good.

Try maybe alarm systems as a search at this url
http://www.horsesearchengine.com/hel...link_partners/
Just get them from relevent sites though.


There may be other factors , but I see this as the most important one.

[Psychobel]

Originally Posted by google junky

There is nothing wrong with ASP in Google that I know of.
I checked a lot of things and couldn't find anything wrong on your site itself, so I'm left to tell you that you need a links strategy.

Yahoo and Google show next to no links from other sites to yours. Possibly your site is not deemed as important or popular enough.

A link which isn't a direct link from
mobile-phone.virtuous.co.uk/phone/camera_cellular_phone.php

A link from an IFrame news page.
http://www.alloi.net/iframe_news.asp

2 or 3 miscellanous sponsered ads showing up as links back to you from dogpile and uk.nextag.com

Start getting backlinks. A few a week would be good.

Try maybe alarm systems as a search at this url
http://www.horsesearchengine.com/hel...link_partners/
Just get them from relevent sites though.


There may be other factors , but I see this as the most important one.

We have a linking strategy which is just kicking in. we have an article or two being published but ideally that was the next stage. The main plan was to get the on site factors correct first, before we invite search engines along.

We've just noticed that on our main site, the new sitemap was submitted on the 24th but is still pending verififcation. Problems at Google?

By the way, I really like the idea of the horse search engine. Now if there was one for dogs, one of our clients would explode with joy.

[ADAM Web Design]

As someone who uses ASP exclusively, I can tell you that Google has no issue with crawling an ASP-based page.

Where it becomes a problem is if you have a querystring that ends up being extraordinarily long or contains "ID" somewhere.

Some of yours do, so that may be the issue. Change "ProductID" to something vague like "Pr" or "ADAMROCKS" (you probably won't want to use the latter.)

Alternatively, a custom 404 might be in order to skirt that issue.

I've also noticed that Google's crawling process in general seems to be slower, and I attribute at least part of that to the new test datacenter (just my own guess, but there are resources going there, resources that could just as easily be put to the spiders.) You may be affected by it as well.

Keep generating IBLs as well...as long as you're not buying them from a link broker (that seems to be something Google's cracking down on lately.)

[Psychobel]

Originally Posted by ADAM Web Design

As someone who uses ASP exclusively, I can tell you that Google has no issue with crawling an ASP-based page.

Where it becomes a problem is if you have a querystring that ends up being extraordinarily long or contains "ID" somewhere.

Some of yours do, so that may be the issue. Change "ProductID" to something vague like "Pr" or "ADAMROCKS" (you probably won't want to use the latter.)

Alternatively, a custom 404 might be in order to skirt that issue.

I've also noticed that Google's crawling process in general seems to be slower, and I attribute at least part of that to the new test datacenter (just my own guess, but there are resources going there, resources that could just as easily be put to the spiders.) You may be affected by it as well.

Keep generating IBLs as well...as long as you're not buying them from a link broker (that seems to be something Google's cracking down on lately.)

Adam, Thanks for that. We'll get the ID bits changed. Do you see any problems using ? or any other characters?

How would you use a custom 404 to rectify the problem? It's not a technique I am familiar with.

[ADAM Web Design]

Never seen any with the ? or & portions of the querystring. It's more the identifiers themselves.

Also, there's a tutorial on 4guysfromrolla.com on how to create a custom 404. I'd post the link, but I'm not in front of my own comp right now.

[siteblueprint]

Here's a search for the 4guyssite that may get you going until ADAM is back at his PC.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:...m%20404%20page

Best of luck.

Gary

[cspelts]

I use ASP exclusively also, and have been known to even use ID in my querystring! Several of my sites have thousands of pages indexed.

I've read that sessionID is the one to avoid - but using something like localID or topicID has posed no problems for me.

[Psychobel]

We're now looking down the route of problems with the sitemap. Things aren't working as they used to and it may be related to custom 404 pages. Here's a sitemaps thread that may be of interest

[ADAM Web Design]

http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/101701-1.shtml

That's the one.

[MrLeN]

I have just a couple of things to say if you want my 2 cents..

I just checked DMOZ and you don't have a listing there. If you haven't already made a submission, you should, because DMOZ listings appear on many search engines. Not critical, but certainly helpful.

Regarding SEO. In all honestly, Google (or any other search engines) doesn't really have a whole lot to chew on. I just took a look at several of the title tags, which are very important, and what I found are very generic titles which aren't going to attract many rankings.

The titles are pretty much all the same, except they end in a different keyword. These keywords are extremely competitive, so if you're after rankings for them, you're not going to get them.

The actual product pages have the same title as the category that they exist in, which also isn't helping. Further, the "keyword" that you have used in the title is not even in the page in many cases.

If you want some Google listings, you're going to have to do much more SEO on this website. I recently SEO'd a website and soon afterwards I managed to get top 10 rankings on Yahoo, MSN and Google for practically all of its keywords and phrases.

There are a couple of things that allowed me to do this.

1 - I blocked search engines from the dynamic site and created a static one instead. Heaps of work, yes, it took me over a month, but now the site is earning several thousands dollars a day and this site has summer products. Considering that 3/4 of the US is covered by snow, sales are doiung very well. By summer the site will be making 10 times that amount.

2 - Much of my time was spent making sure that the keywords for products and categories were present in the titles, links, pages, product descriptions, alt tags, etc. I named page pages and images after the products too. When a search engine hits this site, it just says "WOW - yum yum yum!" Each page and the website as a whole has a "theme" of common/related keywords and the site is plastered with them -- In context, not as spam.

In conclusion, your biggest problem is that the site doesn't have any search engine food. It doesn't have any links, except a blogspot link on MSN. It's not in DMOZ and there's not enough static pages. There aren't enough keywords within each site and there's no real theme. Yet, there is HEAPS of competition.

Much more work needs to be done before you wonder why there aren't more than 4 pages listed in Google.

MrLeN