I am new to SEO, I had done a research and read several guids, but I am still confused.
A google guid said
Avoid creating complex webs of navigation links, e.g. linking every
page on your site to every other page.
I have an e-commerce website. We intend to create a page for each issue of a magazine. issue pages will have Next and Previous link buttons which will move from one issue to another.
Is that a bad idea, Am I violating this rule? or Google is talking about another scenario?
Is that will cause indexing all the 1000 issues? Given that the links are dynamic and I will use URL rewriting.
Thanks
This won't be a problem with Google. They clearly explain why it is a good thing to do and how to do it properly.
If you want to fully control your linkjuice transmition and the landing page from Google with a little website, using this method is not recommanded.
But, if it's for website with more than 1k of unique pages (you can't fully control and influence the webcrawler comportment) you can use this to ease the crawler indexing work and the landing page for users.
Pagination can be a fairly complicated aspect of SEO, especially for ecommerce sites.
Here are a few general tips:
If you have a "view all" page, you probably should rel="canonical" all your paginated pages to that page. This is acceptable because the content is identical
If you don't have a "view all" page, but you want Google to treat the first page as the "canonical" or you want to drive all users to the first page, then use the rel=next/prev attributes to "group" together your like pages
For ecommerce faceted navigation, you should probably use a combination of rel=next/prev and query parameter controls through Google Webmaster Tools
In the June 2012 SMX Advanced conference, there were a few good presentations and live blogging posts that highlights a number of these aspects. More notably, Googler Maile Ohye spoke during that conference ... she's sort of the Queen of Pagination ;)
http://www.slideshare.net/audette/seo-for-pagination-faceted-navigation-canonicalization-hits-and-misses
http://outspokenmedia.com/internet-marketing-conferences/pagination-canonicalization-for-the-pros-smx-advanced-2012/
http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2012/06/pagination-canonicalization-for-the-pros-smx-advanced/
You might also want to watch this Google video with Maile talking about Pagination http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html
Last thing to note ... Bing doesn't support rel=next/prev at this time: http://searchengineland.com/no-bing-doesnt-support-pagination-attributes-to-consolidate-pages-in-a-series-118694
If I understand you correctly YES Google is talking about another scenario.
The Next and Previous links on the issue pages, used for navigation from one issue to another are different from <link rel="next" ... > and <link rel="previous" ... > which appear in the <head> ... </head> section of html source.
Google will treat webpages with <link rel="next" ... > and or <link rel="previous" ... > as a series of pages.
Related
Should one apply rel="nofollow" attribute to site links that are bound for secure/login required pages?
We have a URI date based link structure where the previous year's news content is free, while the current year, and any year prior to the last, are paid, login required content.
The net effect is that when doing a search for our company name in google, what comes up first is Contact, About, Login, etc., standard non-login required content. That's fine, but ideally we have our free content, the pages we want to promote, shown first in the search engine results.
Toward this end, the link structure now generates rel="follow" for the free content we want to promote, and rel="nofollow" for all paid content and Contact, About, Login, etc. screens that we want at the bottom of the SEO search result ladder.
I have yet to deploy the new linking scheme for fear of, you know, blowing up the site SEO-wise ;-) It's not in great shape to begin with, despite our decent ranking, but I don't want us to disappear either.
Anyway, words of wisdom appreciated.
Thanks
nofollow
I think Emil Vikström is wrong about nofollow. You can use the rel value nofollow for internal links. The microformats spec and the HTML5 spec don't say the opposite.
Google even gives such an example:
Crawl prioritization: Search engine robots can't sign in or register as a member on your forum, so there's no reason to invite Googlebot to follow "register here" or "sign in" links. Using nofollow on these links enables Googlebot to crawl other pages you'd prefer to see in Google's index. However, a solid information architecture — intuitive navigation, user- and search-engine-friendly URLs, and so on — is likely to be a far more productive use of resources than focusing on crawl prioritization via nofollowed links.
This does apply to your use case. So you could nofollow the links to your login page. Note however, if you also meta-noindex them, people that search for "YourSiteName login" probably won't get the desired page in their search results, then.
follow
There is no rel value "follow". It's not defined in the HTML5 spec nor in the HTML5 Link Type extensions. It isn't even mentioned in http://microformats.org/wiki/existing-rel-values at all. A link without the rel value nofollow is automatically a "follow link".
You can't overwrite a meta-nofollow for certain links (the two nofollow values even have a different semantic).
Your case
I'd use nofollow for all links to restricted/paid content. I wouldn't nofollow the links to the informational pages about the site (About, Contact, Login), because they are useful, people might search especially for them, and they give information about your site, while all the content pages give information about the various topics.
Nofollow is only for external links, it does not apply to links within your own domain. Search engines will try to give the most relevant content for the query asked, and they generally actively avoid taking the website owners wishes into account. Thus, nofollow will not help you here.
What you really want to do is make the news content the best choice for a search on your company name. A user searching for your company name may do this for two reasons: They want your homepage (the first page) or they more specifically want to know more about your company. This means that your homepage as well as "About", "Contact", etc, are generally actually what the user is looking for and the search engines will show them at the top of their results pages.
If you don't want this you must make those pages useless for one wanting to know more about your company. This may sound really silly. To make your "About" and "Contact" pages useless to one searching for your company you should remove your company name from those pages, as well as any information about what your company does. Put that info on the news pages instead and the search engines may start to rank the news higher.
Another option is to not let the search engine index those other pages at all by adding them to a robots.txt file.
I have a website and in my website I have, for example, a list of Audi models. I saw, using google webmaster tools, that my website appears in the google search by the word audi, but the target page was the 22nd page from my result set, not the first. I need my first page to appead, not my last (or middle), but I cannot tell google that this is a parameter, because my URLs are rewritten using mod rewrite. Any ideas?
BTW, I have read in a SEO forum, that it's a bad idea to use a cannonical tag. So is it really a bad idea in my case?
You can't force Google to do anything, however, they have made it easier to deal with pagination issues with a recent post on rel="next" and rel="prev".
But the primary problem you face is signalling to Google that your first (main) page is the starting point - this is achieved using internal link and back-link "juice" focussed on that page. You need to ensure that the first page of results is linked to properly from higher-value pages (like the home-page).
Google recently announced that you can use View All which will allow them to find and index entire articles that are normally broken up using pagination and display them all as one result.
I am creating a site map for a website.I have recently come to know that instead of site map I can give footer links.So I am confused whether to have a site map or footer links or both.Can anyone suggest me? (considering both Search engine optimization and users navigation)
When you submit sitemap to google - googlebot will visit your site more frequenly, and when you create new site it will index it sooner.
Adding a sitemap will not damage your website. Even with a good set of footer links it's good practice to submit your sitemap to Google et al.
Considering user navigation though I must say a good footer can prove a real good tool to show users what's what and how to find it. A footer isn't a sitemap though, just a summary usually. So why not add both?
I'm maintaining an existing website that wants a site search. I implemented the search using the YAHOO API. The problem is that the API is returning irrelevant results. For example, there is a sidebar with a list of places and if a user searches for "New York" the top results will be for pages that do not have "New York" in the main content section. I have tried adding Yahoo's class="robots-nocontent" to the sidebar however that was two weeks ago and there has been no update.
I also tried out Google's Search API but am having the same problem.
This site has mostly static content and about 50 pages total so it is very small.
How can I implement a simple search that only searches the main content portions of the page?
At the risk of sounding completely self-promoting as well as pushing yet another API on you, I wrote a blog post about implementing Bing for your site using jQuery.
The advantage in using the jQuery approach is that you can tune the results quite specifically based on filters passed to the API and playing around with the JSON (or XML / SOAP if you prefer) result Bing returns, as well as having the ability to be more selective about what data you actually have jQuery display.
The other thing you should probably be aware of is how to effectively use #rel attributes on your content (esp. links) so that search engines are aware of what the relationship is between the actual content they're crawling and the destination content it links to.
First, post a link to your website... we can probably help you more if we can see the problem.
It sound like you're doing it wrong. Google Search should work on your website, unless your content is hidden behind javascript or forms or something, or your site isn't properly interlinked. Google solved crawling static pages, so if that's what you have, it will work.
So, tell me... does your site say New York anywhere? If it does, have a look at the page and see how the word is used... maybe your site isn't as static as you think. Also, are people really going to search your site for New York? Why don't you input some search terms that are likely on your site.
Another thing to consider is if your site is really just 50 pages, is it really realistic that people will want to search it? Maybe you don't need search... maybe you just need like a commonly used link section.
The BOSS Site Search Widget is pretty slick.
I use the bookmarklet thing but set as my "home" page in my browser. So whatever site I'm on I can hit my "home" button (which I never used anyway) and it pops up that handy site search thing.
I Produced a page which I have no intention to let Search Engines find and claw it.
The advisable solution is robot.txt. But it is not applicable in my situation.
So I isolated this page from my site by clearing all links from other pages to this page, and never put its URL in external sites.
Logically, then, it is impossible for search engines to find out this page. And that means no matter how many out-bound links nesting in this page, the PR of site is save.
Am I right?
Thank you very much!
Hope this question is programming related!
No, there's still a chance your page can be found by search engine crawlers. For example, it's been speculated that data from the Google Toolbar can be used to alert Googlebot to the presence of a page. And there's still a chance others might link to your page from external sites if the URL becomes known.
Your best bet is to add a robots meta tag to your page, this will prevent it from being indexed, and prevent crawlers from following any links:
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
If it is on the internet and not restricted, it will be found. It may make it harder to find, but it is still possible a crawler may happen across it.
What is the link so I can check? ;)
If you have outbound links on this "isolated" page then your page will probably show up as a referrer in the logs of the linked-to page. Depending on how much the owners of the linked-to page track their stats, then they may find your page.
I've seen httpd log files turn up in Google searches. This in turn may lead others to find your page, including crawlers and other robots.
The easiest solution might be to password protect the page?