Search Engine Submission [Archive] - Lighthouse Development Forums

web9000

March 12th, 2003, 03:07 PM

Since squirrelcart uses only one URL, index.php (demo.php), I dont see any way to add keywords to a category page to submit to a search engine.

I have alot of products in mutiple categories, everything from golf clubs to womens fashions, and need to submit pages with key words for each category.

If theres another way to do this let me know :)

One way to do this is to use "feeder" pages, however most search engines do not accept pages that use the "redirect" meta tag.

I found this java script that can be used on a static webpage to redirect the visitor right to any cart page you like.


<script language="JavaScript">
bName = navigator.appName;
if (bName == "Netscape")
window.location="copy link to webpage here";
else
window.location="copy link to webpage here"
</script>


Create a webpage and place the script in the "head" section and replace "copy link to webpage here" with the link to the cart page you want to redirect to, you can open any cart page in your browser and copy the link from the address window, should look something like this

http://www.policeshirtsonline.com/index.php?crn=54&action=show&show_products_mode=cat_click


this page is never "seen" by anyone using a java compatible browser so the page doesnt have to be pretty, just use lots of keywords and descriptive text

sample page


<html>
<head><scrolling="no">
<meta name="description" content="page description goes here, use keywords">
<meta name="keywords" content="comma,separated,list,of,keywords">
<title>page title, use more keywords</title>

<script language="JavaScript">
bName = navigator.appName;
if (bName == "Netscape")
window.location="copy link to webpage here";
else
window.location="copy link to webpage here"
</script>
</head>

<body bgcolor="#000000" vlink="#FFFF00" link="#FFFF00">
<div align="center">

<table border="1" width="70%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" bordercolor="#000080" bordercolorlight="#0000C6" bordercolordark="#000080">
<tr>
<td>
<font color="#FFFF00" size=+2><a href="copy link to webpage here">Page Name or Title</a></font>
</td>
</tr>
</table>

<table border="4" width="70%" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" bordercolor="#000080" bordercolorlight="#0000C6" bordercolordark="#000080">
<tr>
<td width="100%" bgcolor="#000066">
<h1 align="center">
<font face="Arial" color="#FFFFFF">

<small>Insert descriptive texe here, lots of keywords</small>

</font></h1>

<p>You can add more links, text, or images here if you like</p>

</td>
</tr>
</table>

</div>
<BR><BR>
</body>
</html>

squire

March 13th, 2003, 10:19 PM

I'll jump into this one since SEO is my specialty. LOL

No, you don't ever want to use any type of redirect. Not JavaScript, PHP, etc. That's one of the fastest ways to get your entire site banned from all search engines. And they will figure it out eventually.

Second, any search engine which can deal with question marks in URLs (most can these days) will spider through all of your pages anyway. So there's no pressing need to create any feeder pages unless you want to put more info out there than will fit in the "description". Fact is, one of the reasons I chose Squirrelcart over some others is that it uses text links and allows me to put the sub-categories on the main page.

Now, if you want to stretch your legs a little and also take care of those few search engines which can't follow ? URL's at the same time, here's how I would suggest leaving some spider food out there for the search engines...

Create a static "Site Map" which is linked somewhere from your first page. You don't even have to call it Site Map if you don't really want human visitors to find it. Nor do you have to include it in the left hand navigation panel. I didn't. I put my link to my site map page down at the very bottom of my first page attached to my Copyright notice.

To keep a consistant look, grab the HTML source code from your squirrelcart pages. Save them as plain old static HTML files. Next create as many static feeder pages targeting the keywords you want to stress. Then link to each of the feeder pages from the Site Map page. To get the best effect, make the keyword/phrase you're targeting for each of those pages part of the A HREF link text and include a brief blurb, like maybe the description.

That's it, you're done!

When a search engine hits your first page it will start to do a crawl of every link it sees on that page it can process. Even if it can't deal with dynamically created pages it will still find the link to your Site Map page, which in turn will lead it to crawl all of your feeder pages. If it can crawl dynamic URL's then you get the old double whammy effect.

Welcome to the Dance!

Squire

web9000

March 14th, 2003, 03:37 AM

cool, thanks

argos

December 15th, 2003, 06:39 PM

This doesnt have anything to do with squirrelcart but rather concerning search engines. I have a webpage as a title page linking to squirrelcart.
In this title page I redirect the potential customer to the paypal site, in order to have them sign up. The paypal site opens in its own frame within the title page frame. Will this cause my website to be banned from any search engines? The url is http://clearlycontainers.com, also is the www required?
Thanks

I'll jump into this one since SEO is my specialty. LOL

No, you don't ever want to use any type of redirect. Not JavaScript, PHP, etc. That's one of the fastest ways to get your entire site banned from all search engines. And they will figure it out eventually.

Second, any search engine which can deal with question marks in URLs (most can these days) will spider through all of your pages anyway. So there's no pressing need to create any feeder pages unless you want to put more info out there than will fit in the "description". Fact is, one of the reasons I chose Squirrelcart over some others is that it uses text links and allows me to put the sub-categories on the main page.

Now, if you want to stretch your legs a little and also take care of those few search engines which can't follow ? URL's at the same time, here's how I would suggest leaving some spider food out there for the search engines...

Create a static "Site Map" which is linked somewhere from your first page. You don't even have to call it Site Map if you don't really want human visitors to find it. Nor do you have to include it in the left hand navigation panel. I didn't. I put my link to my site map page down at the very bottom of my first page attached to my Copyright notice.

To keep a consistant look, grab the HTML source code from your squirrelcart pages. Save them as plain old static HTML files. Next create as many static feeder pages targeting the keywords you want to stress. Then link to each of the feeder pages from the Site Map page. To get the best effect, make the keyword/phrase you're targeting for each of those pages part of the A HREF link text and include a brief blurb, like maybe the description.

That's it, you're done!

When a search engine hits your first page it will start to do a crawl of every link it sees on that page it can process. Even if it can't deal with dynamically created pages it will still find the link to your Site Map page, which in turn will lead it to crawl all of your feeder pages. If it can crawl dynamic URL's then you get the old double whammy effect.

Welcome to the Dance!

Squire

squire

December 16th, 2003, 09:05 AM

Hi Argos,

I took a quickie look and you should be fine on the Paypal redirect. It opened a new browser window for me, and you do have a link on the opening page that leads to your shopping cart. So you should be fine. The spider bots will follow that link (both links actually) just fine.

As to the www / non-www question, generally speaking either will work. Though it does depend somewhat on how your server is set up. My suggestion would be to use the www version when you're posting anywhere or submitting your site since that seems to be what you're using in your code.

It doesn't really matter one way or another from the functionality side of things, but whichever you choose you want to be consistent. So use either-or everywhere. That way the search engines won't get confused and you'll get full advantage of any link popularity. (Why? Some SE's view http://domain.com and http://www.domain.com as two completely separate places, even if they end up in the same place.)

Squire

squire

December 16th, 2003, 09:16 AM

One brief addition while I'm thinking on search engines and squirrelcart...

My squirrelcart-based site was having issues getting all of the pages properly indexed by some of the search engines, namely Google. The first dozen pages or so were indexed just fine, but the deeper, interior product pages weren't getting found or indexed because of the number of variables in the URL strings.

I managed a quick work around on my Linux server to solve the situation by employing mod_rewrite via an htaccess file to rewrite the URL's into something the search engines could handle more easily. I didn't even bother digging into the squirrelcart code to change it at that level (would love to know where that is to further test Jamie or Rich if you can tell me where that linking code is written from!), but instead simply linked the mod_rewrite'd URL's from a site map page.

Since I made the change a couple of weeks ago this site has gone from having 12 unique URL's indexed to having 286 indexed in Google. And it's still picking up more every day, only about 1800 to go! LOL Needless to say, having more internal pages show up, with the product descriptions, has also raised the traffic and sales for the site. We're simply getting found for those specific product searches we were missing before.

If anybody wants to give the work around a whirl, say the word and I'll post it even though it's a bit off topic. And Jamie or Rich, if you can tell me which file(s) control how the cart URL's are constructed I'd really like to test that. If it works out I'll gladly donate the code back to the community so that others can use it to apply a strictly search engine tweak.

Squire

Jamie

December 16th, 2003, 10:34 AM

Hi Squire,

Glad to see you increased your visibility. We will get around to adding a feature for this eventually. Seeing as the method does not modify any Squirrelcart code, feel free to post it. Anyone that applies the changes should be aware that we will not support those changes, as they are not built into the cart.

The code you are looking for that generates the category links is in "squirrelcart/functions/show_categories.func", line 124.

Thanks,
Jamie

argos

December 18th, 2003, 06:10 PM

One brief addition while I'm thinking on search engines and squirrelcart...

My squirrelcart-based site was having issues getting all of the pages properly indexed by some of the search engines, namely Google. The first dozen pages or so were indexed just fine, but the deeper, interior product pages weren't getting found or indexed because of the number of variables in the URL strings.

I managed a quick work around on my Linux server to solve the situation by employing mod_rewrite via an htaccess file to rewrite the URL's into something the search engines could handle more easily. I didn't even bother digging into the squirrelcart code to change it at that level (would love to know where that is to further test Jamie or Rich if you can tell me where that linking code is written from!), but instead simply linked the mod_rewrite'd URL's from a site map page.

Since I made the change a couple of weeks ago this site has gone from having 12 unique URL's indexed to having 286 indexed in Google. And it's still picking up more every day, only about 1800 to go! LOL Needless to say, having more internal pages show up, with the product descriptions, has also raised the traffic and sales for the site. We're simply getting found for those specific product searches we were missing before.

If anybody wants to give the work around a whirl, say the word and I'll post it even though it's a bit off topic. And Jamie or Rich, if you can tell me which file(s) control how the cart URL's are constructed I'd really like to test that. If it works out I'll gladly donate the code back to the community so that others can use it to apply a strictly search engine tweak.

Squire

...........I would like to give it a try.

squire

December 21st, 2003, 09:06 PM

Coolio Jamie ! Thanks for the tip. I may tinker with it a bit more if I can find some time over the holidays. For the record, the site in question is now up to a shade more than 800 "pages" indexed.

Argos, here's what I did. This is all based upon a *nix hosting environment, Redhat Linux in my case. It can be done on a Windows server too, but don't ask me how. I don't do Windows for hosting.

First I created an .htaccess file to put in my root directory. I even added a couple of the keywords I was targeting on the site to the URL just for the sake of having them in the address. Not that it helps all that much with most search engines these days, but what the heck. My .htacess file looks like:

RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^KeywordOne/(.*)/(.*)/(.*) index.php?crn=$1&action=$2&show_products_mode=$3
RewriteRule ^KeywordTwo/(.*)/(.*)/(.*) index.php?crn=$1&rn=$2&action=$3

Depending upon your server setup you may need to tweak the first three lines above a little bit, but that should work for most *nix servers.

Note: You'll want to change the "KeywordOne" and "KeywordTwo" to be your own keywords that you're targeting.

Next, I created a static Site Map page (using the same site design, but I made it a static page and linked it from the main domain page) and you can put all of these new URL's there.

The first RewriteRule above is going to be equal to what you would normally get if you were viewing one of the subcategories from the main page. For example, something like "crn=146&action=show&show_products_mode=cat_click" For that type of URL you would create a link that looks like "www.domain.com/KeywordOne/146/show/cat_click"

All you're doing is cutting out the stuff from the equal sign forward for each variable and throwing a slash in there instead. This makes the URL spiderable for all of the search engines.

The second RewriteRule does the same thing, only at the individual product level. Same concept though, just build the variable identifier data into your static links.

When your site map is done, anyone entering through the front door will get the same thing as they always have. But when search engines spider you they'll find your Site Map and spider all of the internal category and product pages from there. Same data, just a different way of getting there.

One caveat... If your site is going to require more than 100 links on your static site map page you'll want to break that up into multiple pages. Most search engines will not follow more than 100 links on any given page. So keep that in mind when you start constructing your site map.