 | | |
|
Bovine Juice
User
Apr 15, 2008, 11:30 AM
Post #1 of 14
(2468 views)
Shortcut
|
|
Why's Google not picking up my AM2 articles?
|
Can't Post
|
|
Hi
I've been using AM for a number of years now and have 5000-6000 articles. About a year ago I moved to AM2 and gradually since the move I've noticed my site visit stats are beginning to fall. This doesn't make much sense when we have so many links back to us throughout the web. I just ran "site:www.soundsxp.com" (SoundsXP is my site) on Google which should tell me how many pages it's finding and the total's far lower than it should be (it finds about 620 pages).
When I moved over to AM2 I wanted to keep the old number name files archived to stop links from external sites from failing but also have versions of them renamed with the new AM2 descriptive page names for site searches. Having just skimmed through the list of pages on Google it seems like the only pages it's finding are some of the old ones. Practically none of the AM2 ones or renamed AM1 articles seem to be showing up. No wonder my site's stats are plummeting! Any thoughts on why this is happening?
|
|
| |
|
MikeB
Staff
/ Moderator
Apr 15, 2008, 1:47 PM
Post #2 of 14
(2464 views)
Shortcut
|
|
Re: [Bovine Juice] Why's Google not picking up my AM2 articles?
[In reply to]
|
Can't Post
|
|
Hi,
Thanks for the post! 
I'm no SEO guru myself and I'm not too sure specifically why these pages aren't coming up. I'd suggest looking through Google's documentation or even getting in touch with them to see what they have to say about why these pages aren't being indexed.
Because Article Manager is so flexible if they can shed some light on what the issue is (whether it's filenames/paths, links, etc.) you should be able to tweak that to adhere to their standards.
I hope this helps!
Cheers,
Mike Briggs - Product Specialist
support@interactivetools.com
Hire me!
Save time by getting our experts to help with your project. Template changes, advanced features, full integration, whatever you need. Whether you need one hour or fifty, get it done fast with Priority Consulting.
|
|
| |
|
Dave
Staff
/ Moderator
Apr 16, 2008, 9:37 PM
Post #3 of 14
(2450 views)
Shortcut
|
|
Re: [Bovine Juice] Why's Google not picking up my AM2 articles?
[In reply to]
|
Can't Post
|
|
Here's a few things I noticed:
You don't need to have "/artman2/publish/" in the url, but a quick search of google shows over 200,000+ urls that do, so they definately get picked up: http://www.google.com/search?q=allinurl:artman2
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.soundsxp.com
Shows 644 pages
http://www.soundsxp.com/ and http://soundsxp.com/ both link to urls without the "www.".
http://www.google.com/search?q=site:soundsxp.com
Without the "www." shows 2180
Could that be where the missing articles went? Does 2180 sound about right?
Also, I'd check your robots file here: http://soundsxp.com/robots.txt
Unless you have a really good reason to do so, I wouldn't exclude any directories with robots.txt, especially your forum. If you look here, Google has over 18,000+ of our forum pages indexed and we get a lot of traffic from it: http://www.google.com/search?q=site:interactivetools.com+inurl:forum
Hope that helps!
Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com
|
|
| |
|
Bovine Juice
User
Apr 17, 2008, 8:01 AM
Post #4 of 14
(2443 views)
Shortcut
|
|
Re: [Dave] Why's Google not picking up my AM2 articles?
[In reply to]
|
Can't Post
|
|
Cheers for answering Dave. I added the robots.txt because my bandwidth was getting a serious hit from bots checking out the forums. I've deleted it again for a while just to see if it makes a difference.
|
|
| |
|
nigelparry.net
User
May 13, 2008, 3:49 PM
Post #5 of 14
(2355 views)
Shortcut
|
|
Re: [Bovine Juice] Why's Google not picking up my AM2 articles?
[In reply to]
|
Can't Post
|
|
From a $25,000 SEO report I got to read:
Google doesn't respect the underline as a word separator. It only respects the hyphen.
ie. this_is_my_filename.html is not read as separate words but this-is-my-filename.html is read as separate words and counts towards rankings. This was true one year ago, whether it still is I don't know for sure.
No, I don't know why, but that's why people pay SEO experts $25,000 to experiment with Google on their behalf.
My slightly informed belief is that it has something to do with past abuse and the way the Internet developed with the common use of underlines, which are penalized. Of course if it can see a hyphen in a filename and read that as a space, it could do the same with an underline. But hyphens are part of standard written English and underlines are not, so perhaps the issue is that Google can't ignore hyphens.
Unfortunately Artman 2 tries to create file names from the page title and underlines the gaps between words, which may explains why your new files aren't being picked up for the same keywords. They may be there but possibly on page 50 or something. :-)
But of course there could be a number of reasons. Google might not like the duplicate articles on your site and is penalizing you for trying to "game" the search engine, even though what you're doing is innocent.
So this brings me to my $64,000 question:
Mike (or whoever else is game to answer), is there any way of disarming the Artman 2 habit of automatically creating article filenames from article titles separated by underlines?
I've been ploughing through the system-only publishing rules one by one but I still haven't found it, which is how I ended up on this forum! :-)
Thanks!
Nigel
_____________________
For more information about Nigel Parry and nigelparry.net
websites please see http://nigelparry.net
nigelparry.net: award-winning communications
solutions for clients with something to say
Website & print design
Internet, public relations & media consulting
|
|
| |
|
Dave
Staff
/ Moderator
May 13, 2008, 7:35 PM
Post #6 of 14
(2351 views)
Shortcut
|
|
Re: [nigelparry.net] Why's Google not picking up my AM2 articles?
[In reply to]
|
Can't Post
|
|
Hi Nigel,
Searching the net, I see documents on both sides. This google guy says they're now the same (or will be soon?) http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9748779-7.html
Regardless, to be on the safe side, we can switch that code to use dashes instead. Here's some code on how to do it:
http://www.interactivetools.com/iforum/P51314#51314
I'll update that in the source as well for future releases.
Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com
|
|
| |
|
nigelparry.net
User
May 13, 2008, 10:42 PM
Post #7 of 14
(2345 views)
Shortcut
|
|
Re: [Dave] Why's Google not picking up my AM2 articles?
[In reply to]
|
Can't Post
|
|
Thanks for digging that up, Dave!
That's good to know they're on it.
Hey, there's some really good stuff in this article as well! The other things he lists as "not a problem" in the article is reassuring for Article Manager and Listings Manager users. There's a lot of debate about SEO and query strings.
Google's Matt Cutt's blog should probably be recommended reading too. He even has a special section on Google SEO:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/
Thanks! :-)
Nigel
_____________________
For more information about Nigel Parry and nigelparry.net
websites please see http://nigelparry.net
nigelparry.net: award-winning communications
solutions for clients with something to say
Website & print design
Internet, public relations & media consulting
|
|
| |
|
dan_999
User
May 14, 2008, 12:57 AM
Post #8 of 14
(2340 views)
Shortcut
|
|
Re: [nigelparry.net] Why's Google not picking up my AM2 articles?
[In reply to]
|
Can't Post
|
|
Not sure how relevant unique meta keywords and meta description are these days but you might want to consider editing your article templates to include the meta tags as unique fields.
I use an article summary box as my description and a combination of that and my site name as the keywords, all automatically done by article manager.
<meta name="keywords" content="$aticle.name$, $article.summary$">
<meta name="keywords" content="$aticle.name$, $article.summary$, $my.siteName$">
Hartlepool
|
|
| |
|
nigelparry.net
User
May 14, 2008, 1:28 AM
Post #9 of 14
(2339 views)
Shortcut
|
|
Re: [dan_999] Why's Google not picking up my AM2 articles?
[In reply to]
|
Can't Post
|
|
Dan,
For sure, making them unique is definitely a good idea! But there may be some issues with the way you're doing it.
The way I usually do what you're suggesting is create two AM fields for the meta description and meta keywords. In the first, I enter a unique description of the page that differs from the article title, and in the second whatever keywords make sense, separated by commas.
If you put your article title in the description meta tag, it's not unique. And if you put it in the keywords meta tag it's also a straight repeat but, more importantly, it's not comma separated--so unless someone is searches for your full article title, it won't make a difference.
Technically the keywords meta tag could be called "the keywords or key phrases" meta tag because of the comma thing. Any time the comma breaks it--or doesn't--that string of word/s and phrases is what you're offering up to Google. But that may be old school these days. It used to be that the commas were really important.
"saint paul, st paul, web design, minnesota" is one thing for a keywords tag.
but "web design in st paul, minnesota" would only work if in keywords someone was searching for the phrase ""web design in st paul" (google strips periods/full stops as in "st. paul", as well as single or extra double quote marks that aren't around the entire search phrase).
Also, you don't want to make either too long. There are definitely penalties for too many keywords in the keyword tag, and part of the reason for the description tag is for humans to read the summary on search engines. If you look at what Google does, it truncates descriptions after several words.
I tend to believe that Google penalizes for repeats in the title, description and keywords tags.
To me, the ideal mix of content and meta tags would be:
Article Title -- includes a keyword or two that actually describes the content. If it's an article about dogs, it needs that word in there. All the clever headlines we see in the media that perhaps quote some well-known phrase that's nothing to do with the article content aren't good on the web. Stuffing a few keywords at the end of the title separated by commas doesn't hurt, but not too many.
Article first headline and/or paragraph -- repeats a mixture of the keyword/s, description, and/or title.
Description meta tag -- describes the page content without repeating the same as the article title. Maybe offers a synonym, eg. "Dogs, fish, pets I've had"
Keywords meta tag -- repeats the keyword/s from the title, and offers synonyms and different spellings/common misspellings, eg. lasik and lasek.
Article name -- common-keywords-for-topic-of-article.html
Image uploaded to article -- keywords-separated-by-hyphens.jpg -- Alt tags should be utilized, although you can't do that in AM1 for sure (AM2, I don't know yet). That would be the one time I'd repeat and do what you're saying, by putting the caption or article title in an alt tag, simply because there's no other option.
Interactive Tools homepage is as follows:
<title>interactivetools.com - Web Content Management Software Systems</title>
<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Interactivetools.com offers web
content management software systems, including real estate, auto and news
management systems, free CGI Perl scripts, publishing software and more.">
<META NAME="KeyWords" CONTENT="web content management software
systems free scripts cgi perl programming resources">
The Title is good. The Description might be a little long for humans on search engines but is otherwise a fair description. Interactive Tools has abandoned the commas in the Keyword tag. Maybe that's okay these days. I'd stuff "CMS" in there as well. All three say "web content management software" which is good.
Where they have that opening paragraph on the homepage: "We make easy to use, private label content management software for updating and enhancing websites. Whether you resell our software to your clients, or use it on your own website, our products will save you time, save you money, and give you a competitive edge." I'd stuff in the bold part I added too.
The logo is generically named which is thought of as a waste: http://www.interactivetools.com/common/header_logo.gif
Sure it doesn't need to be interactive-tools.gif but there's no reason that it couldn't be content-management-software.gif -- it's an important image at the top of the page. The alt tag is good: "web content management software"
Same with the "what we do" header:
http://www.interactivetools.com/common/head_what_we_do.gif
The "head" part is heading towards "semantic html" as is the various files with "masthead" in their name but maybe "header-what-we-do.gif" would be better, or ditch the repeat and call it easy-web-software.gif instead.
The real trick would be to search for these phrases in google and see how high it scores. And the ones that come up before IT, to look at their sites code and see how they've done it. That's a lot of what SEO people do--look at the competition and mimic it. But in the end, "links to your site" is ALWAYS the bigger deal.
This stuff can drive you nuts. I just tweaked a clients' site yesterday for SEO and I'm totally waiting to see if it worked. I'll post back here if the results were good. :-)
Nigel
_____________________
For more information about Nigel Parry and nigelparry.net
websites please see http://nigelparry.net
nigelparry.net: award-winning communications
solutions for clients with something to say
Website & print design
Internet, public relations & media consulting
(This post was edited by nigelparry.net on May 14, 2008, 1:52 AM)
|
|
| |
|
carminejg3
User
Aug 7, 2008, 1:10 PM
Post #10 of 14
(2026 views)
Shortcut
|
|
Re: [nigelparry.net] Why's Google not picking up my AM2 articles?
[In reply to]
|
Can't Post
|
|
Hi Guys, sorry this is way late. one thing i noticed going from artman1 to artman2 is that it has moved files around. and im setting up a bunch of publishrules to keep everything the same.
For one say you publish article1.html a yr ago, then you post it to an article share sit and 100 sites publish it for you. Google will see your page as the 1st, and not rank the others well. My concern is say your article went from site.com/article1.html to site.com/publish/article1.html you have changed the url. and i feel (not proven) that your article has just become a new page in googles eyes and gets placed after those 100 people publishing your article.
Also its possible that you have both articles up now, and google is seeing it as dup content. also not good. Google is very very good at this stuff, and I wouldn't doubt if they could take a page and the 100 of pages that copied and tell you which ones posted at which times in order. They keep a LOOOOOONNNNNGGGG History. I renamed a few pages years back and catch google looking for them here and there.
You can fix this by making your new urls look like your old urls, or maybe even letting google know you updated your site and the urls changed.
Also get a google account, and get the google webmaster tools. Then validate your site. This will tell you if your robot file is blocking google, which pages google is seeing as dups, and a bunch of other stuff.
Webmaster 
http://news.carjunky.com
|
|
| |
|
nigelparry.net
User
Aug 7, 2008, 7:11 PM
Post #11 of 14
(2002 views)
Shortcut
|
|
Re: [carminejg3] Why's Google not picking up my AM2 articles?
[In reply to]
|
Can't Post
|
|
I've done all of the things you listed from day 1 on one site.
The file names were kept identical from one version to the other.
The site map has only got better than in version 1 and all was Google Webmaster compliant.
BUT...
While the Google Webmaster service appears incredibly comprehensive, the pages are simply not getting registered. There are 12,000 articles on the site, the service has indexed 1,500 of them. What a waste of time.
_____________________
For more information about Nigel Parry and nigelparry.net
websites please see http://nigelparry.net
nigelparry.net: award-winning communications
solutions for clients with something to say
Website & print design
Internet, public relations & media consulting
(This post was edited by nigelparry.net on Aug 7, 2008, 7:13 PM)
|
|
| |
|
carminejg3
User
Aug 8, 2008, 10:46 AM
Post #12 of 14
(1954 views)
Shortcut
|
|
Re: [nigelparry.net] Why's Google not picking up my AM2 articles?
[In reply to]
|
Can't Post
|
|
are they your articles? or 12,000 articles you got from some reseller, with repub rights? or from an article site?
Google realized that it had prob over a billion pages with dups, so if you think about it why list 100 websites with the same article? pick the original and drop the rest. Cuts out their cost for storing a ton of dup content cleans up pages.
if they are your atricles send you a pm with your url.
I also display 100 articles on my index pages and i display about 20-30 articles on a page within the same cat., cause google cant see page two, becasue of the way interactive does the pages.
I'm adding this to artman2:
http://www.interactivetools.com/iforum/Products_C2/Article_Manager_2_F31/calling_as_Subdomain_-_not_working_but_used_to_P62262/gforum.cgi?post=63081;search_string=prev%20next;t=search_engine#63081
also just cause your sitemap shows google you have 12,000 articles, im pretty sure that if google cant crawl the site from a page somewhere, they may not crawl it. I think the sitemap is more of a checklist for them. like yup see that page and that page.
whats funny is im suffering from some form of pr ban because i had a few links to my families sites in my footer. Yet I know a ton of sites that buy and sell links daily and they are fine. Go figure.
Webmaster
http://news.carjunky.com
|
|
| |
|
carminejg3
User
Aug 8, 2008, 12:41 PM
Post #14 of 14
(1949 views)
Shortcut
|
|
Re: [nigelparry.net] Why's Google not picking up my AM2 articles?
[In reply to]
|
Can't Post
|
|
i would get coffee cups sitemapper or a program that crawls your site from the homepage... if google cant get there from the homepage they wont index it.
Webmaster
http://news.carjunky.com
|
|
| |
|
