I've been reading these forums for a couple of weeks now, found a lot of interesting information on SEO, but still have a couple of unanswered questions. I previously had the same title on all pages. Once I read about SEO, I quickly edited the titles, so that every page has its own title. I figure this will increase my chances on getting ranked more often on various keywords. I know that if you have a higher PR, then the Google spiders will more frequently crawl your pages and update them. My site is a PR4. I've waited for 2 weeks now and Google still hasn't updated my pages. What is the ratio on how often your pages will be crawled w.r.t. PR?
there are many factors. If the pages that are linking to you donta have fresh updated content google will crawl them less frequently, so you get crawled less. Sometimes, Google will find your new content and just not update it because you haven't changed enough. There is a ratio of content/changed content Google will ignore minor changes for a while. have patience, once Google updates your titles, it will start coming a little more to look for fresh content. Have the titles been updated in Yahoo or MSN?
A Google XML sitemap will help raise Google's awareness of the pages which have changed. Read up on that. Work on your content, your links, your optimisation and all those other things - have a life. Google and all the other bots will get there eventually and depending on how frequently you update your site and how important they think your site is they'll learn how often they should be returning.
BTW, the site is http://www.MuchGames.com I checked Yahoo and MSN and they haven't updated my listing either. I will take your advice regarding Google Sitemap. I'm gonna have to find a server that supports python first though. My site is scripted with PHP. Could that be a problem?
PHP could be a problem if you are using sessionIDs. Bots don't like 'em. Seems to me that a few months back G changed the way they crawled sites and how frequently they updated the cache on pages. Back when Google showed us a current Page Rank value in the Google toolbar, it was pretty easy to determine how often Gbot would visit a particular page. As an example, PR5 pages would receive almost daily caching. Today, the PR that is displayed is not current and probably trails a few months (but I really have no idea). Plus, it seems to me that Google has changed how they determine which pages to crawl. For sites and pages that have very frequent updates/new content, Google will update the cache on those pages daily or close to it. More links to your site, from relevant pages, should also help to increase the frequency that those pages get their cache's updated. But, I would try to update the content/add content/change content on those pages that you are looking to get updated more often.
Avoid Python like the plague Don't know what Google were thinking there. You should have no problems finding a sitemap script for the major Content Management Systems which will just hook in. The sitemap is just text at the end of the day and PHP can create one easily.
Cool, do you know where I could find such script? Another question: I just read that you should use CSS and reduce the amount of tables in a page. My pages have tons of tables. It all makes sence to me why the spider will not like all the tags etc, but shouldn't a page be more than just TEXT? I mean all these restrictions lead to having a white page with black text on it and nothing else lol.
I think you've misunderstood what the CSS is doing. Check out RealState and view the source. You won't find any colours, backgrounds etc on the page - they're all controlled by the CSS. Is your site a collection of pages - or is generated by a system? If it's a system then you can generate the sitemap relatively easily - but I'd need to know which system - or you can google it
Umm dont know what you mean. My site is MuchGames.com Its actually ONE dynamic php page, which is the main controller of everything. So, its NOT one page for every game. I have 838 games, but they are all loaded dynamically off of one page. However, google listed like 400+ pages for my site. They list every different page, even though they are all index.php. eg. muchgames.com/index.php?gen=Action&game=Kilroy%202 muchgames.com/index.php?category=Racing etc... I'm thinking of redoing the entire site. Making a script that generates a seperate html page for every game. Regarding CSS, I use it, but not to the extent as the realstate.com site. My content isn't steady, so color variations are not always the same.
Do you pull the options from a database or are they hardcoded into a massive if statement? Don't worry about having separate pages. That goes totally the wrong way. Get a CMS (Content Management System) that allows you to have sections/categories and then info about the games. They also let you have the left and right columns, the extra bits whereever you need them. Just takes a bit of patience - but no programming To see a selection of free CMS systems visit www.opensourcecms.com Recommendations: Mambo, Joomla, Drupal, Xoops There are so many there it can be a bit baffling.
All information is pulled from a database I just got myself the GSiteCralwer. However, it seems that it ONLY crawls what is on the first page. The URLs are added into the URL list for further crawling. Once the main page crawling is finished, it does not crawl within the other pages. I made sure all pages are selected for crawling. Out of a possible 1000+ pages, the GSiteCrawler returns around 160 pages