24 replies to this topic

[eragon]

Lots of sites have what amounts to a site map on the home page. As long as it's well organized, it can be quite good for usability. I think we link to almost half the site from our home page at SEORL.

I agree to a point on this one. Organization plays a major role with a site and its contents. But then, a dictionary is also very well organized, but you wouldn't put that at the bottom of your site, right? When you're talking a lot of links, no matter how organized it is, it's going to be ugly.

My company has put up links like this to the geographic locations we service two times, and both times they've taken them down. I'm not saying there's no SEO benefit to having a site on the home page (top, bottom, wherever). What concerns me is that now the needs of the user are playing second fiddle to the spiders.

I propose the following analogy: a site is like a Christmas tree and users love to get in all the branches and see where they lead (okay, work with me here). The thicker the trunk the more sturdy the tree will be (aka a stronger site). What about the spiders? Ahhh, they're attracted to the nice shiny ornaments that are on the tree, but they only come after the tree is fit to be decorated.

If you have too many ornaments, the tree looks gaudy and the tree doesn't look so strong anymore. The line separating the user's needs and the spider's needs has been broken, and things have gotten messy.

Okay, kind of weird mixing spiders and Christmas trees, but hopefully you get my point.

Thoughts?

[BrianR]

What about PR?

In most cases if homepage is PR 5, next level pages are PR4, next level PR3, etc.

In this example, if all pages are linked from the homepage, are they more likely to be PR4?

I've been trying different things on different sites to check this out, but as the Google Toolbar is "broken" I don't have a clear answer, though more of the lower level pages are getting spidered when linked from the homepage.

Hello WCW - I'm afraid I can't answer re the PR because I gave up looking at it a while back - I think it's pretty irrelevant nowadays, as do many others on this board. Having said that, maybe somebody else knows the answer...??

Does it matter if the link to the site map is closer to the top of the code?  On most sites it appears toward the bottom of the page, could the spider move on before getting to that link?  I haven't tried putting it more to the top.

As far as I know, it doesn't matter where the link is on the page, it will still be spidered. I understand that the only exception is that Google will stop spidering if a page weighs in at more than 100K - which is pretty huge!

Also, any ideas on text for the Site Map link, other than "Site Map"?

I'm not sure why you'd want to change the text - IMO, 'Site Map' has become the generic that visitors look for, so changing it may be counter-productive.

HTH

BrianR

[BrianR]

Just so that everyone is aware... There is another thread re site maps that's currently running here:

http://www.highranki...t=0

BrianR

[dbmorgan]

Please allow me to introduce myself as a new member. I run a web based business named Pepper-Passion. Things have gone pretty well in the past year and we were able to achieve a PR of 6 and an Alexa traffic rank that hovers near 100,000 within about six months of starting. We are even staring to post a modest positive cash flow. That is the good news.

The bad news is that our dynamic pages are screwing up the spiders (Google in particular) and only our home page shows a PR. I hope to get my web guy to try and use the Apache rewrite module to help sort of the dynamic pages problem.

I have also received suggestions to add a site map. I am not sure exactly how that site map should look or whether my site would benefit. I have a navigation bar on the left that is visible on every page wherever you go so it is difficult to get buried too deep in the site with no idea how to get back to home. The online catalogue and shopping cart are somewhat separated from the other pages as far as navigation goes so my question is, "Site map or no Site map?" Would I gain anything by adding one?

Thanks & Regards, Bruce

Edited by Jill, 17 September 2004 - 11:33 AM.

[Jill]

Welcome dbmorgan!

It probably wouldn't hurt to add one, and yes, it could possibly help.

Jill

[surftrip]

DHTML is not the way to go if you are looking to achieve accessibility.

the best way to create navigation for ALL types of browser and markup-reading devices is using CSS navigation. using CSS allows the navigation to "breakdown" properly for all browsers, readers ...etc.

now, the reality of the world is, especially in jill's case, traffic is coming from users on browsers and most probably IE.

love it or hate it, it's reality.

but one should still pay attention to accessibility for the future.

[BrianR]

Hello and welcome to the forum, Bruce - and welcome back, Christian - long time no see!

Bruce - I tried to take a look at your site to see how large and complex it might be, but I kept receiving mySQL errors. So, assuming you have a reasonable numbers of pages in your site, then I'd say that a site map page would:

1. Help visitors who like to navigate a site via the site map.
2. Help the bots find every single page in your site.

In fact, I'd suggest that you put a static html site map page up on your site right away, while you're waiting for your web guy to mod rewrite the site - at least that way, both visitors and spiders should be able to access all pages in your site, irrespective of the current problems you have with the dynamic pages.

BrianR

[Randy]

Welcome Bruce !

I see a technical issue that is going to keep your site from being effectively spidered. It appears that you're Requiring a Session ID to be set in order to simply browse the site.

You'll need to do that once a person adds something to their shopping cart in order to maintain state, but you don't want to require it until you absolutely have to.

The spiders don't do Cookies or Session IDs. In the case of your site, if I turn off my cookies I get URL's with PHPSESSID in them. That's not a good thing if you want the pages to be spidered and indexed.

[dbmorgan]

Thanks for the comments. I think the reason we chose php was because I needed the ability to create pages myself as we are an e-commerce site and we have lots of catalogue pages. I am not a programmer and yet I was able to create all of the content on the site using a simple text type editor. Considerations of spiders and page rank and such did not come up a year sago when we started.

I will see if we can dump the session ID's until someone need to add items to the shopping cart.

One guy suggested using redirects to steer users (and bots?) from static pages into the existing dynamic pages. Is this a good solution or would the Apache rewrite be a different and better solution? How do spiders feel about redirects?

Thanks again for the comments
dbmorgan

[Jill]

dbmorgan, your php pages aren't a problem. Look at this forum, the pages are indexed fine. You don't need to redirect anything and will probably cause many more problems if you try to go that route.

Simply fix the session id issue, and you'll be fine.