Hi Dave
hope you had a super holiday
looking into search enginine optimization at the moment, got the meta tags sorted on my site etc, but i'm really struggling to understand why i have so few of my pages getting picked up by search engines.
When i do the site:webpricecheck.co.uk on google i see you have over 36,000 pages listed, when i do site:buy24-7.net i have 2?
Can you advise me on how i could fix this?
been with goole site maps for months now and it has made no difference
Regards
phil
ps - do you still plan to run a network of price compare sites?
Hi Phil,
Holiday was great thanks - 'cept for a 24 hour bout of sunstroke, but that was my fault! :)
When i do the site:webpricecheck.co.uk on google i see you have over 36,000 pages listed, when i do site:buy24-7.net i have 2?
The main thing with Google is still inbound links - if possible you should look at getting links to the homepage from other sites - with as much passed PageRank as possible.
The other thing that may be having an effect in this case is the dreaded "sandbox effect" (Google it for plenty of discussion on the various webmaster forums) where many new domains are not given much coverage for several months.
Are you seeing much googlebot activity in your logs? That would be a good sign that your coverage will improve soon.
Having had a look at your config, one thing I will recommend is to avoid having duplicate sites on both the www and non-www version of your URL (this is called the "Canonical Issue", and is known to cause problems for search engines.
If you visit:
http://webpricecheck.co.uk/
...you will see that you are 301 redirected to:
http://www.webpricecheck.co.uk/
...which is the only base URL that I want Google to consume resources indexing. There are various ways to do this, but my favorite is to have a separate VirtualHost container within the Apache configuration that forces a redirect to the "www" version for any URL that hits the server without the www. It looks like this:
<VirtualHost [ip-address]:80>ServerName webpricecheck.co.uk:80
Redirect 301 / http://www.webpricecheck.co.uk/
</VirtualHost>
In addition to the above; you need to make sure that your VirtualHost container for the www version does not include the non-ww version as an alias (or the other way round as it can sometimes be configured).
ps - do you still plan to run a network of price compare sites?
I would like to but it got so swamped as soon as I launched it that I need to re-think how it's going to work! Watch this space and i'll let you know when "Take 2" is ready for trial!
Hope this helps,
David.