20 replies to this topic

[ranch]

At the bottom of each page of my multilingual website www.fejo.dk I include a menu like this:

<!--#include virtual="/incl/docs/footer_en.asp"-->

The footer_en.asp file contains plain links like this:

<a href="http://www.fejo.dk/docs/ferry_en.asp"><%= Session("ferry") %></a>

(The session variable ferry contains the word "Ferry" tranlated into the language chosen)

So the bottom menu contains regular links to every page in the language chosen (including the page you're on).

Google spiders all my pages quite often (several times a week!) but looking at Googles backlinks for a particular page I see just one link (from my sitemap). The site has been around for quite a while now (5+ months).

Questions: Why are the links from the bottom menu not showing as backlinks? Does Google recognize the code as included and skips it, or is there another explanation?

Another question regarding backlinks, now at site-level:
The site has about 10 dmoz-links. Google Backwards links on the start page shows only 5 of them. For example the link from the world/svenska (sweden) dmoz category, which is more than 2 years old and still present in the dmoz directory itself, is not shown. Why is Google not showing this and other dmoz-links? Is there a limit to how many dmoz-links will improve your rankings with Google?

[domokun]

i would have thought that as the include is server side the spider would never be aware of it and that, therefore, it would have no affect on the page being spidered.

i would guess that it may have something to do with your use of a frameset, however for some reason, either your being clever or im being stupid (hopefully the former!) i am unable to view your frameset source code - so i cant be sure this is the case.

interestingly, if you look at the google cache of the page:
http://66.102.11.104...&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

your links aren't showing up ... your not, by chance, building them with javascript are you?

oh, and how did you manage to get several links from dmoz? i was under the impression that you could only be listed once of twice?!

[ranch]

hi Chris,

As the include is server side the spider would never be aware of it

The explanation might be that simple, but I would like to be sure. Anybody else?

The frames are not the problem. I don't think bots see the site as "framed".

your links aren't showing up in the Google cache

True, due to the link-text being in session-variables. One some pages (german) some of the link-texts are hardcoded (Google sees the text) and I have still have the same problem, so that's not the reason.

how did you manage to get several links from dmoz?

In dmoz you can get a regional link for each language and one extra link in your own language under the business you're in. Of course the decision of any dmoz-editor is based on the quality of the language/wording as well as the relevancy of the content. So for a single-language site the number of links obtainable is normally two as you say!

[mopacfan]

I don't believe that having code in an include file can be harful. The html has to be 'compiled' at the server before being transmitted. I know there is something strange going on because one of my sites had about 170 pages backlinked. Now they have all vanished. A competitor still has over 250 pages internally backlinked. It's very frustrating.

[SearchRank]

Include files are not a problem for spiders to crawl links from because by the time the spider crawls the page, it has already been assembled. So whether a footer is part of the page's source code or an include file, it doesn't make any difference to the spider.

As to your question about backlinks to any internal page, say docs/activities_en.asp for example, it shows a back link from the home page and the site map. You are probably wondering why they do not show backlinks from all the other pages in the site with this set of footer links. The reasoning could be that although Google recognizes all backlinks to a particular page in your site, it will only show backlinks from pages with a PR rating of 4 and above. It could be that all of your main body copy pages within your frameset have a PR of 3 or less and that is why Google is not showing backlinks from them.

[ranch]

Of the 7 pages in english, only one has PR3 the others PR4/5. No matter which page you're on I see a maximum of two backlinks. Always the sitemap (PR4) and sometimes the index page (PR5).

Maybe you're right anyway. The PR of most pages was raised over the last weeks. If the PR data Google uses when calculating which backlinks to show is not brand new, the PR3- theory might hold.

Thanks for the include-file explanation!

[ranch]

New theory: Could it be that Google recognizes the bottom menu as just navigation links whereas links in the copy itself are given much more weight, also when it comes to showing backlinks?

That would actually make sense as in-the-copy-links are much more relevant to the linked-to page compared to menu-links.

[SearchRank]

What I did is to go to Activities from bottom text and then right clicked on body content pert of frame which got me http://www.fejo.dk/d...n.asp?nowritefs. I then copied that into address bar of browser and PR for this page or URL showed at 2/10. I didn't check all pages like this but that is where I got my theory. I believe Google would be looking at PR of the framed page and not the entire frameset.

[AussieWebmaster]

searchrank is right about how they are looking at it all. Google has a cut off... go to AllTheWeb and check your backlinks and see if they are there.

[ranch]

This is beyond my technical understanding. Is what you are saying that:

Google sees
I) http://www.fejo.dk/d...n.asp?nowritefs
and
II) http://www.fejo.dk/d...tivities_en.asp
as two different url's and thus sees A as the url linking to the site's other pages. Because A has a PR of 2 backlinks from that page are not shown.

If this holds true why are there any backlinks at all? All pages and internal links including the sitemap are coded the same way and all type-I url's (including the "?nowitefs") have a PR of 1 or 2. So there should be no backlinks at all?

The sitemap is linked from default.asp using a noscript tag. Is that the reason that the sitemap (PR4) shows up as a backlink for every page on the site? But then why does www.fejo.dk show up as backlink on the activities page as well?

Does this mean that I can never have the full PR-benefit of my internal links or is there a solution apart from not using frames? (I'm not a frames-fan. Only for this site I found them useful.)

[Jill]

If you can see the information provided in the "include" when viewing the page source code, that's what the search engines see.

Jill

[Randy]

Quit trusting what Google allows you to see as backlinks via the link: command and blindly assuming that those count towards PR 100%.

They've never said that link:www.domain.com tells you which backlinks count towards PR. Ever wonder why? Maybe because it doesn't!

Oh, and to echo what others have said, stop building sites for the SE's and build them for your visitors. Everything else works itself out in the end if you do that one little thing.

[ranch]

Well Randy, that's hardly a relevant comment as the site uses frames exactly because my visitors (and not SE's) prefer it. All I'm trying to do is to find out whether the last technical obstacle for the site can be removed, so that it doesn't suffer from any drawbacks compared to sites not using frames.

I realize that this thread is getting pretty technical and might not interest a lot of people on this forum. As Alan Perkins has invented/described the self-referencing framset model that the site is based upon I was hoping for a comment from him. But even without that this great forum has helped me: Now I know what the problem is. Just need the solution!

[SearchRank]

Is what you are saying that:

Google sees
I) http://www.fejo.dk/d...n.asp?nowritefs
and
II) http://www.fejo.dk/d...tivities_en.asp
as two different url's ...

That is correct. The first page (docs/activities_en.asp?nowritefs) is the one that actually contains the footer links and it has a PR of 2. The second URL (docs/activities_en.asp) is a frameset which includes your header, nav and body content and it has a PR of 4 but does not technically contain your footer links. The activities_en.asp?nowritefs page does.

The solution to your problem - get rid of frames so that docs/activities_en.asp is no longer a frameset but rather one single page that contains your footer links.

[AussieWebmaster]

Quit trusting what Google allows you to see as backlinks via the link: command and blindly assuming that those count towards PR 100%.

They've never said that link:www.domain.com tells you which backlinks count towards PR. Ever wonder why? Maybe because it doesn't!

Oh, and to echo what others have said, stop building sites for the SE's and build them for your visitors. Everything else works itself out in the end if you do that one little thing.

The Grinch that Stole Google!


Once upon a time there was a green miserly man who did not want anyone to have any fun... so he started posting instructions for all and sundry to forget about Google and concentrate on their customers... forget about facing the challenges Google has to offer and how working on them makes you a more informed wbemaster...
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But sadly, they were mistaken. They had forgotten to ask how these users had found the site in the first place and so when they stopped working on getting search engine traffic and prettied up their sites, one by one the people left, as people are want to do. Unfortunately there were no new visitors as the webmasters had stopped optimizing, and one day the traffic stopped.

Now they had the brightest and shiniest sites on all the web, but no one knew where to find them and see all this effort.

And as these webmasters lost all their money the green man sat back and laughed, thinking "how silly these people are, to listen to me just because I sounded like I knew what to do!"

And so Google filled the empty spots with the clients of the green man and soon he held the top of the pile at Google.