7 replies to this topic

[Matt B]

Call it whatever you will, but I read the latest MarketPosition Newsletter, especially the article about 22 reasons your site is not indexed. He mentioned that the article was being re-run, but with additional reasons they added over the years. I would suggest removing the "old" reasons that aren't viable anymore . . .

I have to say, that for a company of this caliber, I was surprised to read this . . .

DYNAMIC PAGES: Dynamic pages are often ignored by the search engine spiders. In fact, any URL containing special symbols like a question mark (?) or an ampersand (&) will be ignored by many engines. Pages generated on the fly from a database often contain these symbols. In this situation, it's important to generate "static" versions of each page you wish to be indexed.

Huh? For years, search engines have been indexing dynamic content. There are no problems with "special symbols" and generating static versions of dynamic pages is not necessary. How can this still be considered timely and accurate advice, when the ideas like this are propagated?

I just had to post this as so many people fed this line, in order to get them to agree to products or services they really don't need, such as software to make dynamic pages static and PFI.

Ultimately, the success of getting dynamic pages indexed is the ability to write clean code and limit the amount of parameters in the query string. Yes, there may be some engines that do not index dynamic pathways well, but they aren't ones that anyone cares about . . .

[Haystack]

I noticed that too.

But I have to say that last month's MarketPosition article on paying for a link on a high PageRank site to get your site indexed faster in Google provided MORE misinformation than this month's article.

[Matt B]

I'm glad someone else is noticing this too. It seems as the majority of recent articles in the MarketPosition newsletter have been written back in the '90's.

It could be just my opinion, but the a lot of the advice tends to be either outdated or simply incorrect

[Jill]

I don't know if it's true, but some people say that Inktomi still doesn't index dynamic pages unless you pay.

I know that they CAN because they were the first one to actually index them years and years ago.

However, they'd prefer that you do some handy-dandy trusted feeds these days I guess. Therefore they like that propaganda spread that they can't index dynamic URLs.

I didn't read the Market Position newsletter cuz after digging it out of my spam folder they made me have to click to their site to actually read it. Too much work for me.

Jill

[Matt B]

I know for a fact that Ink will include dynamic pages without paying. Ink may not include them all, but I have had no problem getting dynamic pages included in the Inktomi database. Sometimes more than Google's. But of course, if they can capitalize on ignorance, it's more money from them.

(However, according to Ink, PFI is a fraction of their overall monitization)

I make it a practice to be patient and watch what Ink does before paying for ANY inclusion. In fact, my sites with the best inclusion of dynamic pages in Inktomi are not PFI sites.

[Randy]

Ditto Matt. On all of the above.

Inktomi does just fine indexing my non-PFI dynamic sites too. And the MP Newsletter recently has been much more of a nostalgia trip for me than any useful information. Time to start ignoring it or unsubscribe if they keep that up. Takes up too much time to rehash outdated info, but is good for a healthy laugh.

[crendogal]

I read something somewhere (maybe WMW) recently where someone had run some tests and dynamic urls with more than 10 characters after the ? weren't getting indexed or else weren't getting indexed correctly (truncated). Can't remember if it was Google or alltheweb.com that was the SE, but someone with a site with looooooong doohickies (sorry for the technical term ) after the ? saw the bot coming to a halt in their logs every time it hit one of those specific dynamic pages. Soooo, Marketposition may not be all wrong, just off a bit.

Being one of those people who gets her last name truncated in most online forms (one letter too many for all those 15-char limited lastname fields), and also being married to a programmer for the last 13 years, I'm well aware of how blasted easy it is to program something with a # of characters limit that totally screws things just because nobody bothered to think "will this cause any problems?" So it wouldn't surpise me if at least one of the spiders out there did barf when hitting a URL with >10 chars after the ? symbol.

[Matt B]

after the ? saw the bot coming to a halt in their logs every time it hit one of those specific dynamic pages. Soooo, Marketposition may not be all wrong, just off a bit.

Being one of those people who gets her last name truncated in most online forms (one letter too many for all those 15-char limited lastname fields), and also being married to a programmer for the last 13 years, I'm well aware of how blasted easy it is to program something with a # of characters limit that totally screws things just because nobody bothered to think "will this cause any problems?"  So it wouldn't surpise me if at least one of the spiders out there did barf when hitting a URL with >10 chars after the ? symbol.

The logs will cut off tracking, which doesn't necessarily mean that spiders have stopped indexing, if the dynamic url is template based.

a prime example is : www.dynamicwebsite.com/query.cfm/products/detail.product1

The log file interprets query.cfm/ as a file destination, rather than a path and stops recording. As a result, any product details in this site are not able to be tracked by a typical log file/log analysis program.