Re: FN-FORUM:Search engine optimisation

date posted 1st June 2005 15:29

On 1 Jun 2005 13:35:04 -0000, "Carrie" said:
> I wonder if anyone can help me with this,
> last week I cleaned up the webspace of a client , and put his new
> site in the root of the webhosting site
> www.pertwoodorganicfarm.co.uk, the site has existed in various guises
> and places for the last 8 years and google and other search engines
> do produce a good set of links. The problem is that they will now all
> get 404 errors, I have put in an .htaccess file to redirect them all to
> the root of the site.
> My question is will the initial 404 result, before they get redirected,
> cause my results to go down on google? is there a better thing I can do
> with a .htaccess file to redirect the search engine to the new page?
> The site uses an I frame (i know!) so I have put in a new contents
> page for crawlers
> also there is a very old incarnation of the site which is
> comprehensively listed in the non google powered engines, I have
> inserted a meta tag redirect to the new site I have access to the ftp
> but I can only use html, no htaccess, or scripting, what would be the
> best thing to do with it?

You should really have 301 Permanent Redirects from your old pages to
the most relevant new page - that would give you the best chance of
retaining any good ranking for those pages.

At the moment www.pertwoodorganicfarm.co.uk has no links to it from
other websites, so it's not going to rank well until you get some. If
the website was under a different address before then having some
direct, textual links from HTML pages (or whatever they were before)
would be good. If you have a page doing a meta refresh across to the new
site, then also include a text link on that page for spiders to follow,
as they prefer these over reading links out of javascript.

Ah, I've found the old site. You could get some links by contacting the
people linking to www.pertwood.co.uk and asking them to re-direct their
links to the new site. You can find the people linking to you by going
to Yahoo and searching for linkdomain:pertwood.co.uk

iframes - well, search engines still greatly dislike frames and iframes.
They will read your other pages, but people will get sent direct to
them, so I guess any visitors won't be able to find the rest of your
site as they won't see any navigation (e.g. they will go direct to
http://www.pertwoodorganicfarm.co.uk/wild.php ) One way of getting
around the navigation problem is to include a link at the bottom of the
page back to home, so at least they can get to the main site, another is
to use Javascript to force the page in to a frameset when it loads, if
it isn't all ready in one. The best way is to not use frames, you could
use CSS and PHP includes to get the same effect as they're giving you
without upsetting the search engines, but I'm guessing it's a bit late
for that now.

I'd add some formatting to your contents.php page as it's going to get
seen by people who are directed there by matching searches, so it would
be good if it looked more like a proper page within the site.

The first time I looked at the source of the home page of the site it
had &PHPSESSID=f5a33736dbe8c9519bd7278d4addf0d6 in all the URLs. It's
unlikely most spiders will follow those, as they don't like session IDs
(when the ID changes they can see it as a new page, so they can get
caught spidering all the pages they've all ready got copies of because
they think they're all new, over and over again.) If you've got any
control over that, it would be useful to turn them off, or at least only
trigger them when someone adds something to their basket, or whatever
you're using cookies to track.

By moving domain you now look like you're a new site, so you'll be
caught in Google's 'sandbox' for a few months (seems to be about three
or a little more) this means you get artificially lowered in the search
results until your site has been around for a while.


Sorry to be a bit negative about the whole thing, good luck with it.

Cheers

Paul
--
Paul Silver - Web Development and Technical Search Engine Optimisation
07813 654285 -- http://www.paulsilver.co.uk
Check your web pages: http://www.spidertest.com