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Search engine visibility

thankful
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Sep 30, 2002, 4:37 AM

Post #1 of 6 (2203 views)
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Search engine visibility	Can't Post

1. If I understand how this puppy works, the articles are actual html pages published, not dynamically displayed data (and thus invisible to search engines). (Yes/No/Other?)

2. BUT, the actual links to these pages are SSI based. (Yes/No/Other?)

3. If they are SSI links, can search engines find the links to these articles??? (Yes/No/Other?)

4. What happens to "archived" pages? I'm thinking this merely means they are no longer linked via the SSI? (Yes/No/Other?)

5. Can archived pages be found by search engines? (Yes/No/Other?)

6. Have archived pages "moved" in relation to search engine links found when they were not archived? (Yes/No/Other?)

Putting stuff (articles) on the web that can't be found by people on the web using search engines, seems, um, ass-backwards. I'm hoping that my dark side gave me this awful nightmare last night and that my fears are totally unwarranted. I've got five people (okay one of them is my own toy) using this now, and last night I thought "oh no, I've just made all their great material invisible on the web!" Tell me it ain't so... Pirate

Teambldr
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Sep 30, 2002, 8:35 AM

Post #2 of 6 (2193 views)
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Re: [thankful] Search engine visibility [In reply to]	Can't Post

1. Yes they are published "static" pages

2. The links are "dynamic but are published to each document. You can also hard code categories if you want.

3. Search engines eat these articles for lunch if you set up the templates with keywords, description, title, robots controls, etc...

4,5 and 6. will differ this one to others...

I do not use the archive feature. I am at almost 2000 articles with virtually no slow down in performance on the user or admin sides. Sure it takes a little while to re-publish files but that is a small price to pay to maintain search engine integrity.

Hope that helps! Cool

Brian

thankful
User

Sep 30, 2002, 9:05 AM

Post #3 of 6 (2190 views)
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Re: [Teambldr] Search engine visibility [In reply to]	Can't Post

Thanks Brian,

Great news on 1,2,3. Of course, the title is already provided, and we do use two spare fields to create keywords and descriptions:
<meta name="keywords" content="$art_field2$">
<meta name="description" content="$art_field3$">

Do we need robot controls?

Hmmm...4,5,6 -- we plan to archive each years worth of articles. We publish about 150 articles per year (plus sponsors add another 400-500 articles per year), so it isn't space, it's just the layout -- 5 issues per year are published. We are loading up articles that were hard copy published from the past year, so we have about two months to figure out what we want to do...

Always gotta be a fly in the ointment to keep things interestin, eh?

dlo_itools
Staff

Sep 30, 2002, 9:48 AM

Post #4 of 6 (2189 views)
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Re: [thankful] Search engine visibility [In reply to]	Can't Post

4. Archived pages are not linked, but you can easily add a link to each of the archives.

<a href="http://yoursite.com/cgi-bin/artman/exec/search.cgi?archive=3&search=Search">1999 articles</a>
<a href="http://yoursite.com/cgi-bin/artman/exec/search.cgi?archive=4&search=Search">2000 articles</a>

The archive number used (e.g. archive=3) is found in Setup Optoins - Archive. It is the ID number shown for each archive.

Some search engines might not traverse cgi links. However, some web servers (e.g. Apaches but not IIS) allow cgi links to look like
yoursite.com/search.cgi/archive=3&search=Search

This is a more search engine friendly format. You can tell Article Manager to use this style of published "dynamic" links. In the Setup options, under Server options, there is a checkbox setting for Dynamic Viewer URLs. Enabling this option to use the alternate cgi link format.

5. Yes, if you have a link to the archives as above.

6. The actual URL to view an archive page is different. The original page for an archived article is changed to a redirect page. So old links to articles will still work (and be followed by search engines), but old search requests will not find the article.
/Dave Lo

Teambldr
User

Sep 30, 2002, 10:08 AM

Post #5 of 6 (2187 views)
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Re: [thankful] Search engine visibility [In reply to]	Can't Post

I would suggest using robots controls. It is as simple as added to a spare field "INDEX and NOINDEX" then just select index and it inserts it.

Another good one is the Bulletin Text. For this just use the whole body (content) of the article.

And the reason that Dlo gave for an archive release changing address is the reason that we will not archive. It confuses serch engines and creates issues with links that exist in the search engines prior to archiving.

If an addon is made someday that automatically associates an old page name to a new archive name appears we may rethink this. But until we can make sure that all search engine links are taken care of we will stick with the non-archive approach.

Of course this means that we are in great need for the SQL version to get done soon as we are getting close to 2000 articles in the system. But I feel comfortable that we can exceed that mark without an issue of performance loss (for a little while) Cool

Brian

DataDork
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Sep 30, 2002, 1:27 PM

Post #6 of 6 (2177 views)
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Re: [thankful] Search engine visibility [In reply to]	Can't Post

In Reply To

James Edmonds
DataDork (http://www.datadork.com)

"Have you hugged your pocket protector today?"

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