I've been experiencing some problems with a friends site not being crawled and indexed properly by Google. Could it be because the links have a question mark in them? Some examples of this are found here... http://www.cashflow420.com/store_item.php?INVENTORY_ID=64 & http://www.cashflow420.com/store_item.php?INVENTORY_ID=67 & http://www.cashflow420.com/store_item.php?INVENTORY_ID=3 I came across an article from 2001 that would probably solve my problem, but I'm curious if this is still relevant today before I start to update the .htaccess file and everything else? http://www.sitepoint.com/article/search-engine-friendly-urls
Hey yes this is still relevant in order to optimize indexing, howver this was only a real problem a few years ago, Google today can index URL's succesfully with question marks. So there shouldn't be a problem indexing imo as this was a problem of the past, however it's always advisable to adapt to SE friendly URL's simply so you can include keywords in your URL and hence rank higher as a result.
Also be sure to have a search engine sitemap of all the urls so that the engines can find all the pages.
Are you referring to this sitemap or a different type of sitemap? http://www.cashflow420.com/sitemap.xml If its a different type do you have an example? Thanks for all your help!
That looks like the right format - Do you use Google Webmaster services? That way you can tell when/if Google crawls and can verify the pages on your site.
The problem here is simple. The links on the main pages have big query strings in them, so they INVENTORY_ID=XX isn't being linked to. For example go here: http://www.cashflow420.com/store.php This page is indexed no problems, but click on the "Skip Dog - 1st The Money Then The Power" album and note the URL it's got a large session string in it. This is the same page: http://www.cashflow420.com/store_item.php?INVENTORY_ID=64 He really needs to apply a rewrite and get rid of the canonical problems, the script should generate a $title variable he can incorporate in to the URL. Edit: Also the Head section is a mess, get rid of all this stuff:
Absolutly no problems with that. Google takes a like 2 weeks to index 1 page. So make sure "he" is linking to "his" sitemap in every page. To speed up the process you might want to get some links to the site or directly to the pages you or he wants to get indexed. Post some links in Social Bookmark sites, that should do the trick.
I'm not in the SEO dept here so forgive my ignorance, but isn't all of these meta tags good for SEO? Why would you want these removed?
They they are pretty useless and only serve to bloat the Head section of the document with code. This for example: Why would you want to tell Google to go away and "don't" come back for 15 days? And this: Why tell them to index everything, they will anyway. Besides you just told him to go away for 2 weeks lol. This one is funny: A document, on the web.. Nah it can't be. Sorry, but i'm sure you get the idea. Just limit it to Title, Description and Keywords and keep it simple. To be honest some of those tags i have "never" seen used on a live website and i have been doing SEO for 8 or 9 years now.