Hi, I have been messing about with an old site of mine (the one in my signature) and submitted it to google via their add-url link again. (I originally did this about 2 years ago so some of my pages were allready "known" to google). As expected, it is being crawled by google, yahoo, picsearch and a few other random crawlers since the last week or so... I have noticed some traffic coming in from yahoo, but for some reason, any search term that a user enters seems to only result in my site map being listed. As you can see, it's a pretty basic site, just dynamically created pages off a database backend. I do not intend to add any ads on this site, it was basically just an experiement and handy site which will hopefully run itself and use minimal bandwidth. You can see a link at the bottom of each page to the sitemap which is just every link on my entire site listed out. So as an example, someone recently entered "nottingham university loughborough site" in yahoo UK, and my site was listed 4th. For some reason, the page returned is my site map, and not the actual page for nottingham university (which would match the keywords far better). Notice, that if you click the link in yahoo called "More pages from this site" the next 2 links returned are the actual pages for nottingham university and loughbourough university as expected. Basically, my question is, how I can get search engines to list only the main pages for each university, rather than the site map? Also, if anyone is feeling helpful and has the time, could you please comment on the optimization of a particular page. I have tried to do all the obvious things, like mod-rewrite the urls, and use the H1 tag, and stick in the correct title and description etc.. Thanks! Sham.
Hello, Search Engines do no understand forms, only the visitor does. You'll have to have links pointing to your site for your entire site to get indexed. For this, a pagerank of two or three is required. LEt the forms be there but also try hyperlinking stuff from the homepage. All the best. Regards, Dilip Samuel
Thanks Dilip, but the problem isn't that my site is not being indexed. In fact, google has over 1000 pages indexed. The problem is that, of the pages indexed, the page that is returned in response to a user search is the sitemap page, not the specifica matching page... I see what you mean about the form on the root page. But, there is also a link to the sitemap on the root page, so surely all the other pages can get indexed in that way? Maybe I need some sort of code in my sitemap page that tells the search engines not to index it?
you need to change your internal linking structure. The SE's think your sitemap is the most important page because it is linked to from everypage of teh site. I would not link to the sitemap so often. Perhaps just on the homepage. Perhaps even create several different sitemaps for the different sections of your site. What may be a good idea is put all the links and content from the sitemap and put it on the homepage. That way the site will get indexed and possibly search quesries will make people land on your homepage. Not sure what will be best for ya. You are gonna have to play around with your internal linking.