Encouraging deep linking.

Getting product pages indexed by search engines isn't always straight forward, here are some tips that can help.

1. Set the robots meta tag to follow links from each page ie <meta name="robots" content="index, follow" /> This gives search engines the permission they need to follow links deeper into your site and can stop them indexing only a proportion of your sites pages.
2. However ensure any private directories are secured by passwords or have a robots.txt file that prohibits indexing of the content. ie
   User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /images/

3. Content management systems can insert extraneous data such as '?' and '&' characters into the address of a page, by simplifying the address, ideally to reflect a standard directory structure format the pages become much easier for search engine spiders to follow.
4. Ensure that page titles and textual content are descriptive of the actual products and relate strongly to potential search queries.
5. Try not to use JavaScript for links, plain old (x)html is what spiders love best.

As a test type "site:www.mysite.com" into Google and record the links carried to your site, then reappraise after several weeks (it can take a month or so for Google to re-index).

Further Reading:
www.robotstxt.org
http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt8/linking_ward.htm

Top Download:

Subjects: