During on of our more search engine optimisation news sessions just after Christmas we reported on scraper sites. Just a reminder that scraper sites are sites that take a selection of content from DMOZ and display the high page rank links. This is bad because sites then start to build unrealistic page ranks.
As I said scraper sites came to our attention just after Christmas. As we were aware then that sites that were scraping were getting a 3 month soft filter applied to them, now that is not the case. If a site gets caught by Google they get immediately banned from the listings indefinitely.
Martin Vernon
SEO Consultant and Web Programmer
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »
One of the first things you should do once your brand new website is live on the internet is make sure that the major search engines can find all of your pages. There is no point in having a 100 page website if the search engines can only see your homepage. It is very important that each page of your website links to every other page on your site. Avoid using JavaScript drop down menus as navigation, or flash driven menus as the search engines will not be able to follow or even recognise the links. If you are going to use these types of navigation, make sure that you either create a sitemap which is linked to from your homepage or insert textual links at the bottom of each page.
Another option is to create an xml sitemap which lists all of the urls contained within your website. This sitemap file can then be submitted to Google, where it can be crawled on a regular basis. You can even create a sitemap which updates itself when ever a new page is added your website. Another feature of Google’s xml sitemaps is the ability to view log files using your Google sitemap account, which can tell you if Google encountered any errors when it last crawled your website i.e. it will inform you of any broken links.
If you would like more information on creating an xml sitemap for your website, please fill out our enquiry form on our contact page.
Ben Ashton
SEO Consultant
Posted in Search Engine Optimisation | No Comments »
