As a search engine optimization specialist
I often optimize existing web pages for small business clients, upload
them to the site and see pages re-indexed by Google within a week. This
only happens with existing business sites that have been online for a
few years. Google seems to be updating their index as often as every
other week at this point and older established sites that are already
indexed seem to be re- crawled on that twice a month schedule on a
fairly routine basis.
Two clients that hired me for recent work saw their rankings shoot to
the top for a newly targeted search phrase in a weekend when I did
optimization on a Thursday and they were ranked instantly by Saturday.
Now keep in mind that this doesn't happen for everyone, only those that
have been online for some period and already have significant content
that simply needs tweaking and proper title and metatag information
added. They usually have relatively good existing PageRank and do well
for other RELEVANT search phrases already. I offer that warning only to
avoid instilling false hopes in anyone hoping to achieve the same
instant ranking boost overnight.
Those clients that do succeed in this way are often thrilled with the
results accomplished in such short order. I'd love to be able to offer
that type of ranking boosts to everyone, but some are more equal than
others when it comes to easy, inexpensive SEO tune-ups that rev up your
rankings overnight. Your mileage may vary.
WHY DO NEW SITES SUFFER?
What is going on with newer sites that don't get crawled for months?
I've got a client, a newer attorney directory that offers tons of great
information in the form of articles on specific areas of law, links to
incredibly valuable and relevant legal sites and over 600,000 attorneys
listed by practice area and state. Yet the site has not been re-crawled
by Google for over 3 months! Now this would not be such a big issue for
many sites, but this site is relatively new and we've optimized all the
titles, tags & page text, created a complete site map and placed links
to all these resources on the front page.
I know that the site is not being crawled because Google's cached copy
of the front page shows it before we did the work four months ago,
without the new links and without title tags. We've submitted the site
by hand, (manually) once a month for three months via the Google Add URL
page. http://www.google.com/addurl.html When the hand submission failed
to get it re-indexed for four months, we submitted the sitemap page,
which has not been crawled at all. Google shows only ONE page on this
site, when in fact it has thousands of pages, a sitemap and dozens
static pages!
Part of the problem is that this site must be dynamic, since a database
of over 632,000 attorneys must be accessed, retrieved and served for any
of those law firms searched for to be returned to the site visitor.
Google warns owners of dynamic sites that Googlebot may not crawl
dynamically generated pages with "?"" question marks in the URL. This is
to avoid crashing the server with too many concurrent page requests from
Google's spider. http://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html#A1
The solution to this dynamic URL problem has been discussed widely in
search engine forums and solutions have been bandied about including
software provided by SEO's, URL re-write techniques for dynamic pages on
APACHE servers http://www.alistapart.com/articles/urls/ and PHP pages
http://www.stargeek.com/php-seo.php to generate search engine friendly
URL's. Others recommend simply adding static HTML sitemap pages as
alternatives for the search engine spiders. In this instance the
client's developer simply said "I can't do that (PHP solution) on this
server". So we resorted to putting up the static HTML sitemap pages with
hard-coded
URLS to the main 54 pages of the site at
http://lawfirm411.com/Law-Firm-411-sitemap.html This should get at least
those fifty pages crawled by Googlebot, but Googles' spider appears not
to be crawling this site at all. How do we know this? See for yourself
by using the following query in the search box at Google:
allinurl:www.lawfirm411.com where the result page shows ONE page in the
results. If you try that query on your own site (replace your own domain
name for lawfirm411.com), you'll see the results lists ALL your pages.
The site home page was crawled by Google four months ago, when they took
their "Cached Snapshot" of the page. You can see this by visiting the
Google cached page here: http://66.102.7.104/search?sourceid=navclient&;ie=UTF-8&q=cache:www.lawfirm411.com
where the date of this snapshot is "Apr 20, 2004 07:42:19 GMT" and they
haven't been back since. The page in that snapshot has none of the newly
added links, an outdated title tag, and old content.
This problem is not unique to this site. One client we worked with two
years ago had a dynamically generated, framed site! Those two site
structures have always given search engines trouble. Their site was not
crawled at all and only the front page showed up. Our solution was to
create a second domain (owned by the client), which had static HTML
pages that precisely mirrored the content of the client's framed,
dynamically generated site. Guess what happened after Googlebot crawled
the static site? Google indexed the framed site in full and then banned
the static site from the index! Not an approach we advocate, but the one
that worked for this client.
We're still searching for ways to get Googlebot back to LawFirm411.com
before creating that new static site, but decided to share this odd
experience with the SEO community before going to any extremes. Google
provides over 70% of most search engine referred traffic to ALL of our
clients and we realized we can't site idly by and see a major client
languish because Googlebot didn't like what it found at the client site
on the first visit four months ago. This issue dogs newer sites in other
places as well. The Open Directory Project has also become notoriously
slow in adding new sites to the directory and in this case, has not
picked up this site even after 6 regular monthly submissions. The web
playing field may have begun tilting toward older, established sites and
away from new ones.
Mike Banks Valentine is
the SEO for
http://www.lawfirm411.com
Contact him at
http://www.seoptimism.com/SEO_Contact.htm
Improve Your Small Business Online at
our Ecommerce Tutorial
http://website101.com/Free-Tutorials/index.html
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