google search results and "?" in urls

patrick99e99

Hello everyone,

A client of mine has been complaining that their website is not getting the search results that they desire. They are a yoga / martial arts company, and by searching "yoga martial arts" in google, they are showing up on the 11th or 12th page index.

I did some reading on google's documents, and they said: "Consider creating static copies of dynamic pages. Although the Google index includes dynamic pages, they comprise a small portion of our index. If you suspect that your dynamically generated pages (such as URLs containing question marks) are causing problems for our crawler, you might create static copies of these pages. If you create static copies, don't forget to add your dynamic pages to your robots.txt file to prevent us from treating them as duplicates."

I was wondering if this was indeed a concern... First off, their index.php file is nothing more than a splash screen with no text, just a welcome page (which they have expressed that they wanted because it's "clean").

Secondly, by navigating to any of the menu bar links, the urls generated are indeed things like store.php?selected=dvds&dvdselect=1#desc

So, I wanted to get some advice from you guys here... Do I really want to create static pages that have all the content of each page displayed? If I do this-- and these static pages are what google finds, won't that pose a problem as anyone who clicks on this google search result, will be brought to some funky page that has tons of displayed content (and not the way the actual site should behave)?

Thank you.

-patrick

NogDog

First off, their index.php file is nothing more than a splash screen with no text, just a welcome page (which they have expressed that they wanted because it's "clean").

I don't know enough to answer you question about the static pages, but the above is not helping. The primary factors that affect a Google page rank are (1) the number and quality of external sites that link to it and (2) the actual body text of the page in question (with some emphasis given to headings, <em>, <strong>, <b>, and <i> tags). This is yet another reason for avoiding splash pages (in addition to the reason that they generally annoy users who want to get straight to whatever information it is that they're looking for). I would therefore strongly recommend to your client that the index page be revised to include meaningful textual content.

Roger_Ramjet

First point, everyone is trying to get their site on the first page of google so no matter what strategy is used, many of the others will also be using it. Basically they get there first and there is nothing you can do about that except to wait.

Google add weighting to sites that are updated regularly, so make sure you do that. Over months this will pay off as google will recognise this and index your site more frequently.

Google also uses search clicks to rank pages, so sites that have been around for a while will have existing click counts that push them up the list. You can use this to boost your site by spending lots of time clicking your site from the search results - using different IPs of course and different search terms and different times of day over weeks.

Best hidden boost is to register and pay for google adwords - bid high to get on the front page and to get onto other peoples sites more often. Hopfully this will lead to more clicks and therefore more ranking.

The actual site structure is very important. Search terms are given more weight the earlier they appear in your site content, so make sure that they are in the first sentences and appear often. You can use CSS to hide them off-page if it would spoil your design to have your search terms at the beginning, or redesign your page.