SEO Training

Robots.txt file is damaged or it contains a typo:
If search engine robots misinterpret robots.txt file, they might completely ignore web pages.Double check robots.txt file and make sure that use the disallow parameter only for web pages that really don’t want to have indexed.

URLs contain too many variables:
URLs with many variables can cause problems with search engine robots. If URLs contain too many variables, search engine robots might ignore pages.Here’s Google’s official statement about web pages with many variables:
“Google indexes dynamically generated webpages, including .asp pages, .php pages, and pages with question marks in their URLs. However, these pages can cause problems for our crawler and may be ignored.”

Use session IDs in URLs:
Many search engines don’t index URLs that contain session IDs because they can lead to duplicate content problems. If possible, avoid session IDs in URLs. Better use cookies to store session IDs.

Web pages contain too much code:
Web pages can contain JavaScript code, CSS code and other script code that is not directly related to content. Visit your website with a web browser and select “View source” or “View HTML source”.
If it is difficult to spot the actual content of website then search engines might also have difficulty to parse pages.

Website navigation causes problems:
Fancy JavaScript or DHTML menus cannot be parsed by most search engine robots. Flash or AJAX menus are even worse when it comes to website navigation.
As mentioned above, search engine robots are very simple programs. They can follow HTML links, all other links can cause problems.

Optimized web page content and good inbound links are crucial for high search engine rankings. However, the best content and the best links won’t help much if search engines cannot index pages.
Make sure that search engine spiders can index web pages without problems so that web pages can get the rankings they deserve.

Filed under: seo tactics