I have a website with updated content daily. I have two questions:
How does google see this content? Do I need a SEO in this case?
Does the error 404 page have an influence on the ranking on the search engine. (I do not have a static page)
So Google can "know" the content is supposed to be updated daily, it may be useful (if you don't do it yet) to implement a sitemap (and update, if necessary, dynamically). In this simemap, you can specify for each page, the update period.
This is not a constraint for Google, but it can help to adjust the frequency of indexing robots visit.
If you do, you must be "honest" with Google about times updates. If Google realizes that the frequency defined in the sitemap does not correspond to the actual frequency, it can be bad for your rankings.
404 errors (and other HTTP errors) can actually indirectly have an adverse effect on the ranking of the site. Of course, if the robot can not access content at a given moment, it can not be indexed. But scoffers, if too many problems are encountered during the visit of your site by web crawlers, Google will adjust the frequency of visits to the downside.
You can get some personalized advice and monitor the process of indexing your site using Google Webmaster Tools (and to a lesser extent, Analytics or any other tool that could monitor the web crawlers visits).
You can see the date and time when Google last visited your page. So you can see that Google adapted your updated content or not. If you have a website with updated content daily then you can ping your website to many search engines and can also submit your site in Google.
You can make a sitemap for only those urls who have a daily updated content and submit to google webmaster tools. You can define your date and time when the url was last modified in tag. You can also give a hint how frequently your page will likely to change under tag. You can set high priority for the pages which are modified daily under tag.
If you have 404 error (file not found) page then then put them in one directory and define it in your robots.txt file. So Google will not crawl that web pages and automatically it will not be indexed. It will not make any influence on your SERP ranking.
Related
My website has about 500.000 pages. I made sitemap.xml and listed all pages in it (I know about limitation 50.000 links per file, so I have 10 sitemaps). Anyway I submitted sitemaps in webmastertool and everything seems ok (no error and I can see submitted and index links). Hoverer I have a problem with spidering frequently. GoogleBot spiders the same page 4 times per day but in sitemap.xml I tell that the page would be changed yearly.
This is an example
<url>
<loc>http://www.domain.com/destitution</loc>
<lastmod>2015-01-01T16:59:23+02:00</lastmod>
<changefreq>yearly</changefreq>
<priority>0.1</priority>
</url>
1) So how to tell GoogleBot not to spider so frequently as it overload my server?
2) the website has several pages like http://www.domain.com/destitution1, http://www.domain.com/destitution2 ... and I put canonical url to http://www.domain.com/destitution. Might it be the reason of multi spidering ?
You can report this to Google crawling team, see here :
In general, specific Googlebot crawling-problems like this are best
handled through Webmaster Tools directly. I'd go through the Site
Settings for your main domain, Crawl Rate, and then use the "Report a
problem with Googlebot" form there. The submissions through this form
go to our Googlebot team, who can work out what (or if anything) needs
to be changed on our side. They generally won't be able to reply, and
won't be able to process anything other than crawling issues, but they
sure know Googlebot and can help tweak what it does.
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-crawl-report-problem-19894.html
The crawling will slow down progressively. Bots are likely revisiting your pages because there are internal links between your pages.
In general, canonicals tend to reduce crawling rates. But at the beginning, Google bots need crawl both the source and target page. You will see the benefit later.
Google bots don't necessarily take lastmod and changefreq information into account. But if they establish content is not modified, they will come back less often. It is a matter of time. Every URL has a scheduler for revisits.
Bots adapt to the capaccity of the server (see crawling summary I maintain for more details). You can temporarily slow down bots by returning them http error code 500 if that is an issue. They will stop and come back later.
I don't believe there is a crawling issue with your site. What you see is normal behavior. When several sitemaps are submitted at once, the crawling rates can be temporarily raised.
We have a ton of content on our website which a user can get to by performing a search on the website. For example, we have data for all Public companies, in the form of individual pages per company. So think like 10,000 pages in total. Now in order to get to these pages, a user needs to search for the company name and from the search results, click on the company name they are interested in.
How would a search bot find this page? There is no page on the website which has links to these 10,000 pages. Think amazon, you need to search for your product and then from the search results, click on the product you are interested in to get to it.
The closest solution I could find was the sitemap.xml, is that it? Anything which doesn't require adding 10,000 links to an xml file?
You need to link to a page, or for it to be close to the homepage for it to stand a decent chance of getting indexed by Google.
A sitemap helps, sure, but a page still needs to exist in the menu / site structure. A sitemap reference alone does not guarantee a resource will be indexed.
Google - Webmaster Support on Sitemaps: "Google doesn't guarantee that we'll crawl or index all of your URLs. However, we use the data in your Sitemap to learn about your site's structure, which will allow us to improve our crawler schedule and do a better job crawling your site in the future. In most cases, webmasters will benefit from Sitemap submission, and in no case will you be penalized for it."
If you browse Amazon, it will be possible to find 99% of the products available. Amazon do a lot of interesting stuff in their faceted navigation, you could write a book on it.
Speak to an SEO or a usability / CRO expert - they will be able to tell you what you need to do - which is basically create a user friendly site with categories & links to all your products.
An XML sitemap pretty much is your only on-site option if you do not or cannot link to these products on your website. You could link to these pages from other websites but that doesn't seem like a likely scenario.
Adding 10,000 products to an XML sitemap is easy to do. Your sitemap can be dynamic just like your web pages are. Just generate it on the fly when requested like you would a regular web page and include whatever products you want to be found and indexed.
I'm working on improving the site for the SEO purposes and hit an interesting issue. The site, among other things, includes a large directory of individual items (it doesn't really matter what these are). Each item has its own details page, which is accessed via
http://www.mysite.com/item.php?id=item_id
or
http://www.mysite.com/item.php/id/title
The directory is large - having about 100,000 items in it. Naturally, on any of the pages only a few items are listed. For example, on the main site homepage, there are links to about 5 or 6 items, from some other page there links to about a dozen different items, etc.
When real users visits the site, they can use search form to find item by keyword or location - so there would be a list produced matching their search criteria. However when, for example, a google crawler visits the site, it won't even attempt to put a text into the keyword search field and submit the form. Thus as far as the bot is concern, after indexing the entire site, it has covered only a few dozen items at best. Naturally, I want it to index each individual item separately. What are my options here?
One thing I considered is to check the user agent and IP ranges and if the requestor is a bot (as best I can say), then add a div to the end of the most relevant page with links to each individual item. Yes, this would be a huge page to load - and I'm not sure how google bot would react to this.
Any other things I can do? What are best practices here?
Thanks in advance.
One thing I considered is to check the user agent and IP ranges and if
the requestor is a bot (as best I can say), then add a div to the end
of the most relevant page with links to each individual item. Yes,
this would be a huge page to load - and I'm not sure how google bot
would react to this.
That would be a very bad thing to do. Serving up different content to the search engines specifically for their benefit is called cloaking and is a great way to get your site banned. Don't even consider it.
Whenever a webmaster is concerned about getting their pages indexed having an XML sitemap is an easy way to ensure the search engines are aware of your site's content. They're very easy to create and update, too, if your site is database driven. The XML file does not have to be static so you can dynamically produce it whenever the search engines request it (Google, Yahoo, and Bing all support XML sitemaps). You can find out mroe about XML sitemaps at sitemaps.org.
If you want to make your content available to search engines and want to benefit from semantic markup (i.e. HTML) you should also make sure your all of content can be reached through hyperlinks (in other words not through form submissions or JavaScript). The reason for this is twofold:
The anchor text in the links to your items will contain the keywords you want to rank well for. This is one of the more heavily weighted ranking factors.
Links count as "votes", especially to Google. Links from external websites, especially related websites, are what you'll hear people recommend the most and for good reason. They're valuable to have. But internal links carry weight, too, and can be a great way to prop up your internal item pages.
(Bonus) Google has PageRank which used to be a huge part of their ranking algorithm but plays only a small part now. But it still has value and links "pass" PageRank to each page they link to increasing the PageRank of that page. When you have as many pages as you do that's a lot of potential PageRank to pass around. If you built your site well you could probably get your home page to a PageRank of 6 just from internal linking alone.
Having an HTML sitemap that somehow links to all of your products is a great way to ensure that search engines, and users, can easily find all of your products. It is also recommended that you structure your site so more important pages are closer to the root of your website (home page) and then as you branch out gets to sub pages (categories) and then to specific items. This gives search engines an idea of what pages are important and helps them organize them (which helps them rank them). It also helps them follow those links from top to bottom and find all of your content.
Each item has its own details page, which is accessed via
http://www.mysite.com/item.php?id=item_id
or
http://www.mysite.com/item.php/id/title
This is also bad for SEO. When you can pull up the same page using two different URLs you have duplicate content on your website. Google is on a crusade to increase the quality of their index and they consider duplicate content to be low quality. Their infamous Panda Algorithm is partially out to find and penalize sites with low quality content. Considering how many products you have it is only a matter of time before you are penalized for this. Fortunately the solution is easy. You just need to specify a canonical URL for your product pages. I recommend the second format as it is more search engine friendly.
Read my answer to an SEO question at the Pro Webmaster's site for even more information on SEO.
I would suggest for starters having an xml sitemap. Generate a list of all your pages, and submit this to Google via webmaster tools. It wouldn't hurt having a "friendly" sitemap either - linked to from the front page, which lists all these pages, preferably by category, too.
If you're concerned with SEO, then having links to your pages is hugely important. Google could see your page and think "wow, awesome!" and give you lots of authority -- this authority (some like to call it link juice" is then passed down to pages that are linked from it. You ought to make a hierarchy of files, more important ones closer to the top and/or making it wide instead of deep.
Also, showing different stuff to the Google crawler than the "normal" visitor can be harmful in some cases, if Google thinks you're trying to con it.
Sorry -- A little bias on Google here - but the other engines are similar.
I've submitted sitemap.xml files to google webmaster tools and it says that i has all of the page in total but under "indexed" it says "--"? How long does it take for Google to start indexing? This was a couple of days ago.
A Sitemap is a way for webmasters to help Search Engines to easily discover more pages from their websites. A Sitemap should be considered an aid, not a duty. Even if you submit a Sitemap there's no guarantee that the URLs listed in the Sitemap will be read or included in Search Engine indexes.
Usually it takes from a few hours to some day to be indexed.
Quotes from a Google source
"We don't guarantee that we'll crawl
or index all of your URLs. For
example, we won't crawl or index image
URLs contained in your Sitemap.
However, we use the data in your
Sitemap to learn about your site's
structure, which will allow us to
improve our crawler schedule and do a
better job crawling your site in the
future. In most cases, webmasters will
benefit from Sitemap submission, and
in no case will you be penalized for
it."
Mod Note: An attribution link was originally here, but the site linked to no longer exists
It usually takes up to two weeks to be indexed. Just give it some time :)
In short: it depends.
If your website is new, Google will have to crawl and index it first. This can take time and depends on many factors (see the Google FAQs on indexing).
If the website is not new, it's possible that you are submitting URLs in the Sitemap file which do not match the URLs that were crawled and indexed. In this case, the indexed URL count is usually not zero, but this could theoretically be the case if the URLs in the Sitemap file are drastically wrong (eg with session-ids).
Finally, if you are submitting a non-web Sitemap file (eg for Google Video or Google News), it's normal for the indexed URL count to be zero: the count only applies for URLs within the normal web-search results.
Without knowing the URL of the Sitemap file it's impossible to say for sure which of the above applies.
Our SEO team would like to open up our main dynamic search results page to spiders and remove the 'nofollow' from the meta tags. It is currently accessible to spiders via allowing the path in robots.txt, but with a 'nofollow' clause in the meta tag which prevents spiders from going beyond the first page.
<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow">
I am concerned that if we remove the 'nofollow', the impact to our search system will be catastrophic, as spiders will start crawling through all pages in the result set. I would appreciate advice as to:
1) Is there a way to remove the 'nofollow' from the meta tag, but prevent spiders from following only certain links on the page? I have read mixed opinions on rel="nofollow", is this a viable option?
<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.mysite.com/paginglink" >Next Page</a>
2) Is there a way to control the 'depth' of how far spiders will go? It wouldn't be so bad if they hit a few pages, then stopped.
3) Our search results pages have the standard next/previous links, which would in theory cause spiders to hit pages recursively to infinity, what is the effect of this on SEO?
I understand that different spiders behave differently, but am mainly concerned with the big players, such as Google, Yahoo, MSN.
Note our Search results pages and paging links are not bot-friendly, in that they are not re-written and have a ?name=value query string, but from what I've seen spiders no longer just abort when they see the '?' as the results pages ARE getting indexed with decent page rank.
To be honest you are looking at nofollow wrong. Chances are the search spiders are already especially Google, Yahoo, and MSN searching the nofollow pages, because they still have to hit those pages to see if they have a noindex.
The real problem is nofollow doesn't actually mean don't follow, it just means don't pass on my reputation to this link. So unless you are aggressively blocking bots, which it doesn't sound like you are, changing the ROBOTS meta tag and robot commands on links will not effect performance because they are already hitting your site. To confirm this just look at your HTTP Server Log.
So my vote is that you will not see any problem with removing the robot limits.
I've seen Google index a calendar system that had relative links on each page through the end of time (Jan 19, 2038 - see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem). We didn't notice the load on our servers until it exposed a bug in the source code dealing with dates in 2038.
I don't know about the other search engines, but Google offers a number of helpful tools for controlling how much the googlebot impacts your server infrastructure. See http://www.google.com/webmasters/.
There is an option in webmaster tools to set the crawl rate for your site.
Google bots are pretty intelligent about not traversing an entire database of dynamically-generated pages, as long as the URLs give some hint that they are dynamic (i.e. file extension of .asp or .jsp, etc. and numeric ids as query parameters). If you use rewrite rules to make your URLs "friendly", then the bots have a harder time determining whether or not it's a static page they are reading or a dynamically generated page. See this Google article for more information about dynamic vs. static URLs.
You may also want to consider creating a Google Sitemap to give the bots a better idea about what pages on your site can be indexed and which cannot.