Gooooooood Mornin

[FrankieJ 0]

Mornin folks

 

I have another one of those website questions http://www.dj-forum.co.uk/html//emoticons/fear.gif (I hear ya)

 

Ok can someone tell me, when Google make searches with there little spiders do they search the whole of you website or just the Index page.

 

Basically what I need to know is, should I just concentrate on adding "meta tags" ( I think thats them) etc to my homepage or should I add them to all pages of my website (Which ive done)?

 

Many Thanks http://www.dj-forum.co.uk/html//emoticons/stupid.gif

[NiM 0]

Google follows the links on your website, so in theory it will spider every page in your website that is linked to an existing page.. IE if you link to "gallery" from your main page, then it'll add the gallery page to it's list of pages to spider. Then if you have any links off your gallery page it'll add those and so on..

[Hugmaster 0]

Hi

 

Yes google follows the links through your site, however it's unlikely that Google will go any further than three levels down.

 

If you want to really make sure spiders get every page, built a sitemap page which is basically a list of all the pages in your site and links to them. Stick the sitemap as a link from your home page and Google spiders will quite merrily follow your breadcrums.

 

Darren

[ian 0]

Note also that it doesn't do it all in one go. It will look at the pages it knows about, then when analysing them, identify the next lot of pages to look at - but it won't do that until its next visit (which could take a while).

 

I'm currently working on a new site and I added that to google a few weeks ago - when I checked, Google only knew about half a dozen of the pages on the site. Now, a few weeks later, it knows about 49 of the pages. By the way if you don't already know how to find out what Google knows about your site, you can use the "site:" directive, for example if you search for "site:www.dj-forum.co.uk" it will return a list of all the pages it knows about from this site.

[MadGutts 0]

Search engines will only follow your links if you tell them to in the meta tags.

 

 

[ian 0]

QUOTE (MadGutts @ Sep 28 2005, 11:36 AM)

Search engines will only follow your links if you tell them to in the meta tags.

That's not really true.

 

The standard policy for most major search engines (Google, for example) is to follow all links unless told otherwise. You do not need to add a robots metatag like this in order for this to happen. It would do no harm to do so, but it is not necessary.

 

The robots metatag is more commonly used in the negative (NOFOLLOW or NOINDEX) to keep a robot away from part of your website. For example, here's what Google has to say about the subject.

Edited September 30, 2005 by ian

[Andy Westcott 0]

I would agree with that.

 

Regarding meta tags generally though, don't bother with them. They are left-overs from the early days of the WWW when it may well have been useful to have such tags as 'keyword', 'author' and so-on. The major search engines apparently stopped looking at meta tags years ago simply because of the ease with which they could (and were) abused.

 

Just ensure you have a correct doctype declaration at the top of your page and that your code is W3C compliant.

 

Search engines stall badly on poor and non-compliant code, 'Flash' front doors and frames. Avoid or correct this, and ensure you have plenty of good quality and relevent content. "Design for people, not search engines" is good, solid advice all round.

[ian 0]

QUOTE (Andy Westcott @ Oct 22 2005, 08:34 PM)

Regarding meta tags generally though, don't bother with them. They are left-overs from the early days of the WWW when it may well have been useful to have such tags as 'keyword', 'author' and so-on. The major search engines apparently stopped looking at meta tags years ago simply because of the ease with which they could (and were) abused.

I don't think this is quite right either. I can give you a counter-example from one of my web sites.

 

This is the setup. I have some gallery pages on my site of photos I've taken at gigs. On the gallery page itself, there is a brief paragraph of text about the gig and some thumbnail pictures. Clicking on a thumbnail will take you to a new page with a large version of the picture on it. That page also has a title (effectively the caption for the picture) and some navigation, but no other text. However, within the description metatag for that page I have a copy of the text from the gallery page (hope you're following this) even though the text itself does not appear anywhere on that page.

 

Now, when I look for my pages in Google, if I get a result that matches a large picture page, Google displays a paragraph of text in its search results (like it does for most pages), but the only place that text appears on that page is in the description meta tag. So, it would seem that Google is pulling the text from the description meta tag because it can't find any other text on the page.

 

I know it's a bit tricky to describe, but I hope you understand what I've written.

[FrankieJ 0]

Hi ian

 

Do you have a website we can look at?

[ian 0]

QUOTE (FrankieJ @ Oct 24 2005, 04:42 PM)

Hi ian Do you have a website we can look at?

Sure - and it will make my example clearer I think.

 

I'm still working on it and trying to sort out some stuff on it - it doesn't display correctly on IE5 and there are some accessibility issues amongst other things. But you can see it at www.ianf.info.

 

Using that site, here's a concrete example of what I was talking about earlier. First,

look at this example of an image page on my site. You can see that it has no descriptive text on it.

 

Now go to Google and search for "ianf nicky" (without the quotes) - the top match should be the same page that you've just looked at. Looking at that entry, you will see descriptive text (as I described earlier). But that text isn't on the page (as you know because you've just looked at it), but it is in the description meta tag. So Google is using the description meta tag.

[reENERGIZE 0]

Read a pretty authoratative looking article on the web (which could remember where it was but on a new PC and lost all my favourites and links in the crash).

 

Not all spiders are using Meta Tags and expectation is that they will dwindle in use. But hey it takes only a few minutes to add them to all your pages so why not - can't hurt

 

If you are feeling lazy use PHP include function you can keep all your meta tags in one file then changes to that automatically flow through your whole site.

 

Add this in the header of all your pages.

 

<?php

include("address of you meta tags file");

?>

 

Also be careful using likes of Dreaweaver to do drop down menus etc. They tend to add code that doesn't use the standard href HTML tages so the search enginers will never get off your front page as they can't see the links.

[DJ Dicky 0]

Google and most other search engines no longer use meta tags to give you a good position in the search list but they do use the description tag as the text in the search result returned.

 

hope that made sense.

 

Dicky