Swati Lathia

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Month: August 2017

Structural Decisions

By Swati LathiaPosted on Posted in SEO, SEO TutorialsNo Comments on Structural Decisions

Auditing an Existing Site to Identify SEO Problems

Auditing an existing site is one of the most important task for SEO professional. This includes those who have developed CMSs, so there is a lot of opportunity to find problems when conducting a site audit.

Please check : Elements of Audit

Structural decisions include some of the key points as follows

  1. Target Keywords
  2. Cross-link relevant content
  3. Use Anchor text
  4. Use breadcrumb navigation
  5. Minimum link depth

Session Ids in URLs : Crawler Confusion

By Swati LathiaPosted on Posted in SEO, SEO TutorialsNo Comments on Session Ids in URLs : Crawler Confusion

Session IDs are most common in e-commerce sites and are embedded in a URL so the website can track their users or consumers from page to page and they are used to keep track of items in a consumer’s shopping cart.

But these IDs cause problems for search engine crawlers because they create a large number of links for the spider to crawl. This can create a situation where the search engine indexes essentially the same page over and over. Search engines like Google refer to it as a ‘spider trap’, which we will discuss later on.

Below are a few examples of how session IDs can give the appearance of an endless number of pages within a single site. A crawler coming to your website may find a page with the following URL:

http://www.yoursite/shop.cgi?id=dkom2354kle03i

This page gets indexed but when the spider returns later to look for new content, it finds the following:

http://www.yoursite/shop.cgi?id=hj545jkf93jf4k

This is actually the same page as before, just with a different special session ID but the spider sees it as a new URL. Because of this confusion, search engine spiders are programmed to avoid pages containing these session IDs.

Dynamic URLs : Caution For SEO

By Swati LathiaPosted on Posted in SEO, SEO TutorialsNo Comments on Dynamic URLs : Caution For SEO

During earlier times, all websites used static HTML pages and so the first search engines were oriented towards static web pages. As the web technology developed several new methods to generate websites and dynamically generated web pages came into being. Dynamic web pages differ from static pages in that there is no physical equivalent to the page you may be viewing on the server.

Dynamic URLs are generally used if the content of a site is stored in a database and pulled for display on pages on demand.

But it is said that URLs have a distinct disadvantage in that different URLs can carry the same content.

 

A simple example would be a 1000000 page site with each page generated with the format below

http://fishbase.org/Country/CountrySpeciesSummary.cfm?c_code=356&id=24516
http://fishbase.org/Country/CountrySpeciesSummary.cfm?c_code=356&id=24517
http://fishbase.org/Country/CountrySpeciesSummary.cfm?c_code=356&id=24518
http://fishbase.org/Country/CountrySpeciesSummary.cfm?c_code=356&id=24519
http://fishbase.org/Country/CountrySpeciesSummary.cfm?c_code=356&id=24520
http://fishbase.org/Country/CountrySpeciesSummary.cfm?c_code=356&id=24521……

All the above mentioned six URLs end up with six different landing pages. But when the search engine tends to remove the information subsequent to the first offending character, the question mark (?), ultimately all the six pages become identical :

http://fishbase.org/Country/CountrySpeciesSummary.cfm
http://fishbase.org/Country/CountrySpeciesSummary.cfm
http://fishbase.org/Country/CountrySpeciesSummary.cfm
http://fishbase.org/Country/CountrySpeciesSummary.cfm
http://fishbase.org/Country/CountrySpeciesSummary.cfm
http://fishbase.org/Country/CountrySpeciesSummary.cfm

At this instant, your unique pages have become identical, and consequently the URL’s are duplicated which won’t be indexed by the search engines.

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