Still not indexed well

Corporal Joined: Mar 12, 2004 Posts: 52

Hey guys,
I installed Googletap on my site 1 week ago and I haven't seen increased indexing yet. It's funny too, because I used to be high on a search for "Bodyboarding" http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=bodyboarding&btnG=Google+Search but now there are some crumby sites way ahead of mine.

Any suggestions?
I think it may be because I have my phpnuke files in a folder off of the main root.

i.e. www.eastcoastbodyboarding.com uses a header(location) function to point them to www.eastcoastbodyboarding.com/2004.
Any thoughts or suggestions?

Posted: Fri May 21, 2004 5:04 pm

Get rid of the redirect function. That's likely the problem. Use mod_rewrite with a 301 (redirected permanently) rule, or set the destination page to be the homepage. Google doesn't like redirections and may ignore you site altogether because of it.

Drop this in your webroot .htaccess file after turfing the redirect function you have in your header:

Code:

RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://www.eastcoastbodyboarding.com/2004/$1 [L,R=301]

This redirects http://www.eastcoastbodyboarding.com/* to http://www.eastcoastbodyboarding.com/2004/* and Goole will follow the redirect and index the destination page.

I also suggestion creating a search engine friendly sitemap, and link that sitemap at the bottom of your pages. There's a free online sitemap tool at http://www.netroglycerine.com/sitemap.html - just plug in your web address and hit enter. When it's done, save the file as sitemap.html and upload it to your site. The sitemap will help search engines find and index all the pages on your site. A little trick few people know about.

Corporal Joined: Mar 12, 2004 Posts: 52

Hey - Thanks alot for the suggestions and the htaccess change.

I tried implementing that, but it didn't redirect people anymore when I removed the index file.

Code:

RewriteRule ^/(.*)$ http://www.eastcoastbodyboarding.com/2004/$1 [L,R=301]

I liked the sitemap tool - I had a huge file generated - I will try to implement it in.

Is there a site I can go to to learn more about syntax in the .htaccess files? Thanks.

Posted: Fri May 21, 2004 8:35 pm

Yeah - http://www.engelschall.com/pw/apache/rewriteguide/

Did you put that rewrite line in the .htaccess file in your webroot / or in /2004? It should go in the webroot.

Corporal Joined: Mar 12, 2004 Posts: 52

I put it in my public_html, do I need to go deeper to be at the webroot?

Corporal Joined: Mar 12, 2004 Posts: 52

tried deeper too.

Posted: Tue May 25, 2004 9:07 pm

Hmm... Try this instead. Tested on my server and it worked:

Code:

RedirectMatch ^/(.*)$ http://www.eastcoastbodyboarding.com/2004/$1 [L,R=301]

Corporal Joined: Mar 12, 2004 Posts: 52

that had some wierd results ... it made my URL www.eastcoastbodyboarding.com/2004/2004/2004/...etc.

I may just move my phpnuke directory to my webroot, so instead of 2004 it will just be right there. Are there any problems this might cause that you can think of. I know I will have to change some image paths.

Posted: Wed May 26, 2004 11:36 pm

I am not totally sure Google bots index redirect homepages...

Posted: Fri May 28, 2004 10:56 pm

It's difficult to test the rewrite rules as I can't emulate your exact setup, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to move your nuke install into the top level in your web root. Or, move it into /cms or something more generic and setup a single index.html splash page in the root. Google will index redirected pages so long as the httpd response code is 301.

Nuke Cadet Joined: Sep 22, 2004 Posts: 7

Hamesh,
After i create and upload the sitemap.html file to my root, do i still need to link it to all my pages? Or will it suffice to just have the file in my root directory? thanks.

Nuke Cadet Joined: Sep 22, 2004 Posts: 7

Hamesh,
One more question. Is there something I can change (header??) that will all google to pick up my site description. Or does the crawl automatically get the information from the body of my home page? i'm trying to improve the ranking of my site. it currently has no ranking.

Posted: Thu Sep 23, 2004 6:17 pm

Yes, you need to link to your sitemap.html file. Really you only need to link it off the mainpage/homepage, but to help Google out, add the link into your footer so it appears on all pages. You can edit the footers of your pages from Administration --> Preferences.

Google will index the text of your pages, but it's still a good idea to make use of META description and keywords tags. To edit the keywords for your site, edit your ~/includes/meta.php file. To set the description for your site, update your site slogan in Administration --> Preferences.

And be sure to GoogleTap your site!

Nuke Cadet Joined: Sep 22, 2004 Posts: 7

thanks. will try it right now.

Nuke Cadet Joined: Sep 22, 2004 Posts: 7

Hamesh,

I found this bit of advice on another site:

"3. Instead of the META Refresh tag, you can also use JavaScript to load a new document:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript">

</SCRIPT>

Most search engine robots ignore JavaScript so this method of redirection is unlikely to be penalized."

If I need to redirect my nuke site, will this work?

If so, where do I insert this script? The index.php file?

Thanks.