Spider/bot results not picking up all pages

[JimFL]

Hi,

I have a site that I am trying to optimise for more search engine results. When I try typing the
site:www.example.com
in google to list of the pages it has indexed, the google bot seems to have only picked up some of the pages and not all of them. I know that the bot scans the index page to find all the links connected to other pages and then searches for all those pages and the links within them.

So for some reason the bot is not indexing some of my pages on the site.

Just to explain the structure of the site :

I am using a index page containing includes to different pages. So each page has a different url. Hence the googlebot should identify them as different pages.

ie. www.example.com?id=1

All these pages set a php attribute for the title tag. They are working fine.

However the pages that are not displaying have the php attribute for the title tag passed through from a
_GET['title'] parameter.

Can anybody tell me why these pages are not being picked up by the browser? after all the title tag is displayed in the browser. Is it something to do with the extra characters that are set within my _GET parameter?

index.php?id=1&title=this%20is%20my%20example

Please help.

JimFl

 

[rye8261]

Give it time, the bots will get to all the pages at their own pace.

You are usually good with up to 3 (I believe) parameters with the GET, but after that most search engines will not index.

You can try to use a rewrite tool to turn your pages from something like "index.php?id=title..." to more like "/id/title/..."

---------------------------------------

http://www.thefloptalk.com

http://www.ogdb.org

 

[ChrisHunt]

It seems a little cumbersome to pass the page title as a parameter like that, and an open invitation for people to deface your site. If I linked to a page on your site as index.php?id=1&title=I%20am%20an%20idiot , Google will eventually index that page, and might conceivably rank it higher than your page with the proper title.

I don't speak php, but could you not have an array of page titles for each id number? Something like this:

$title[1] = "Index";
$title[2] = "About";
$title[3] = "Products";
...
$title[99] = "Contact";

$thispagetitle = $title[_GET['id']];

You can, I believe, use includes in php so you'd only have to put the list of titles in a single file and include it into the others.

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd

 

[Foamcow]

Just to check

are you using _GET['title'] or $_GET['title'] ?

Can you output that value to the browser to test it?

Have you checked the $_POST global (I always get these mixed up)?

Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web design and ranting
Buy Languedoc wines in the UK

 

[alrichey]

Also make sure you have a robots.txt file

Luke Richey, MCSE
Tometa Software, Inc.

http://www.tometasoftware.com/

Get stress relief at

http://www.mrtometahead.com

Luke Richey, MCSE
Tometa Software, Inc.

http://www.tometasoftware.com/

Get stress relief at

http://www.mrtometahead.com/

 

[johnwm]

I believe that a robots file will only inhibit bots from searching specified folders - it won't encourage them.

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