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02.10.10 Building Site Architecture And Internal Links  By Stoney deGeyterIn order to move your site up in the search engine rankings you have to get your optimized content to the search engines in the most streamlined way possible. There are some common problems that often stand in the way of that. These problems may not keep the search engines from finding and indexing and even ranking your content, however they can greatly effect the performance of that content in terms of how well it ranks in the search results. Too many URL parameters The web is littered with long complicated URLs such as this: site.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ ProductDisplay?storeId=10051&langId=-1&catalogId=10053&productId=100615137 &N=10000003+90401+528374 Aside from changing the actual domain name, the URL above is a real one. Look at it closely, everything after "ProductDisplay?" are the various parameters that tell the browser what content to pull up. Each "=" in the URL represent a different parameter. Each parameter represents a slight variation of the content. Every variation represents a potentially different page that can be indexed by the search engines. The search engines want to index valuable content, but URLs such as this can often send engines away. They don't want to be caught into endless loops of variation. While the search engines certainly have no problem indexing dynamic content, once you get more than three parameters your risking losing the search engines all together. The engines tend to shy away from sites with duplicate content or endless loops created by many parameter possibilities. Your best bet is to keep the parameters down to a minimum. Inaccessible content Great content is often inaccessible to the search engines either because it's hidden behind search options or buried deep within the site. Setting up a proper navigation and clickable link search structure is essential for any site, but even more important for large sites with hundreds of pages or products. Some pages have to be buried, there just isn't any other way to go about it. But they don't have to be so deep that they can't be found without a GPS tracking device. It's all a matter of laying out your site's architecture so all pages have a proper place and that the most beneficial content is the easiest to find. Session IDs Session IDs create duplicate content by the hundreds, if not thousands. Every visitor to a site is given a session IDs which is appended to the end of each URL visited. Multiply your visitors by thousands and you now have thousands of new URLs all pointing to the same content. There are some workarounds when using session IDs for tracking, however there are better solutions altogether that you should look into. Continue reading this article. About the Author: Stoney deGeyter is president of Pole Position Marketing (www.PolePositionMarketing.com), a search engine optimization / marketing firm providing SEO and website marketing services since 1998. Stoney is also a part-time instructor at Truckee Meadows Community College, as well as a moderator in the Small Business Ideas Forum. He is the author of his E-Marketing Performance eBook and contributes daily to the E-Marketing Performance (www.eMarketingPerformance.com) marketing blog. |
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