Abandoned by Google! Googlebot, Wherefore Art Thou Googlebot?

As a search engine optimization specialist I often optimize existing web pages for small business clients, upload them to the site and see pages re-indexed by Google within a week. This only happens with existing business sites that have been online for a few years. Google seems to be updating their index as often as every other week at this point and older established sites that are already indexed seem to be re- crawled on that twice a month schedule on a fairly routine basis.

Two clients that hired me for recent work saw their rankings shoot to the top for a newly targeted search phrase in a weekend when I did optimization on a Thursday and they were ranked instantly by Saturday. Now keep in mind that this doesn't happen for everyone, only those that have been online for some period and already have significant content that simply needs tweaking and proper title and metatag information added. They usually have relatively good existing PageRank and do well for other RELEVANT search phrases already. I offer that warning only to avoid instilling false hopes in anyone hoping to achieve the same instant ranking boost overnight.

Those clients that do succeed in this way are often thrilled with the results accomplished in such short order. I'd love to be able to offer that type of ranking boosts to everyone, but some are more equal than others when it comes to easy, inexpensive SEO tune-ups that rev up your rankings overnight. Your mileage may vary.

WHY DO NEW SITES SUFFER?

What is going on with newer sites that don't get crawled for months? I've got a client, a newer attorney directory that offers tons of great information in the form of articles on specific areas of law, links to incredibly valuable and relevant legal sites and over 600,000 attorneys listed by practice area and state. Yet the site has not been re-crawled by Google for over 3 months! Now this would not be such a big issue for many sites, but this site is relatively new and we've optimized all the titles, tags & page text, created a complete site map and placed links to all these resources on the front page.

I know that the site is not being crawled because Google's cached copy of the front page shows it before we did the work four months ago, without the new links and without title tags. We've submitted the site by hand, (manually) once a month for three months via the Google Add URL page. http://www.google.com/addurl.html When the hand submission failed to get it re-indexed for four months, we submitted the sitemap page, which has not been crawled at all. Google shows only ONE page on this site, when in fact it has thousands of pages, a sitemap and dozens static pages!

Part of the problem is that this site must be dynamic, since a database of over 632,000 attorneys must be accessed, retrieved and served for any of those law firms searched for to be returned to the site visitor. Google warns owners of dynamic sites that Googlebot may not crawl dynamically generated pages with "?"" question marks in the URL. This is to avoid crashing the server with too many concurrent page requests from Google's spider. http://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html#A1

The solution to this dynamic URL problem has been discussed widely in search engine forums and solutions have been bandied about including software provided by SEO's, URL re-write techniques for dynamic pages on APACHE servers http://www.alistapart.com/articles/urls/ and PHP pages http://www.stargeek.com/php-seo.php to generate search engine friendly URL's. Others recommend simply adding static HTML sitemap pages as alternatives for the search engine spiders. In this instance the client's developer simply said "I can't do that (PHP solution) on this server". So we resorted to putting up the static HTML sitemap pages with hard-coded

URLS to the main 54 pages of the site at http://lawfirm411.com/Law-Firm-411-sitemap.html This should get at least those fifty pages crawled by Googlebot, but Googles' spider appears not to be crawling this site at all. How do we know this? See for yourself by using the following query in the search box at Google: allinurl:www.lawfirm411.com where the result page shows ONE page in the results. If you try that query on your own site (replace your own domain name for lawfirm411.com), you'll see the results lists ALL your pages.

The site home page was crawled by Google four months ago, when they took their "Cached Snapshot" of the page. You can see this by visiting the Google cached page here: http://66.102.7.104/search?sourceid=navclient&;ie=UTF-8&q=cache:www.lawfirm411.com where the date of this snapshot is "Apr 20, 2004 07:42:19 GMT" and they haven't been back since. The page in that snapshot has none of the newly added links, an outdated title tag, and old content.

This problem is not unique to this site. One client we worked with two years ago had a dynamically generated, framed site! Those two site structures have always given search engines trouble. Their site was not crawled at all and only the front page showed up. Our solution was to create a second domain (owned by the client), which had static HTML pages that precisely mirrored the content of the client's framed, dynamically generated site. Guess what happened after Googlebot crawled the static site? Google indexed the framed site in full and then banned the static site from the index! Not an approach we advocate, but the one that worked for this client.

We're still searching for ways to get Googlebot back to LawFirm411.com before creating that new static site, but decided to share this odd experience with the SEO community before going to any extremes. Google provides over 70% of most search engine referred traffic to ALL of our clients and we realized we can't site idly by and see a major client languish because Googlebot didn't like what it found at the client site on the first visit four months ago. This issue dogs newer sites in other places as well. The Open Directory Project has also become notoriously slow in adding new sites to the directory and in this case, has not picked up this site even after 6 regular monthly submissions. The web playing field may have begun tilting toward older, established sites and away from new ones.

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

Mike Banks Valentine is the SEO for http://www.lawfirm411.com

Contact him at http://www.seoptimism.com/SEO_Contact.htm

Improve Your Small Business Online at our Ecommerce Tutorial

http://website101.com/Free-Tutorials/index.ht ml

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

---

The Secret To Getting Indexed In Yahoo

Getting indexed in Yahoo has become very difficult in the... Read More

Work With The Search Engines - Dont try to Outsmart the Search Engines

Contrary to the claims of high-priced SEO firms, optimizing your... Read More

Have You Been Dropped By Yahoo?

Yahoo has fairly recently updated its guidelines. You can read... Read More

SEO Expert Guide - Page Optimization (part 5/10)

In parts 1 - 4 you learnt how to develop... Read More

Google Local Search And The Impact On Natural Optimization

With the advent of Google Local, a service that helps... Read More

How To Syndicate Your Content

Note: In order to preserve the proper format for the... Read More

Google Traffic Report Card-Does Your Website Pass? Part 1

This is part 1 of a 7 part series that... Read More

Tips On Optomizing Your Website For Search Engines

I wish to give a few little tips, about optimizing.... Read More

Link Building for Hilltop

Hilltop is one of the major concepts underpinning Google's search... Read More

A Way for Search Engines to Improve

Wouldn't it be nice if the search engines could comprehend... Read More

How to Top Google by Writing Articles

Search engines determine their rankings based on two things: ... Read More

Search Engine Marketing Hype Killing Small Businesses

Think about the first thing you ever heard about "marketing... Read More

SEO #4: Off-page Optimization

Yesterday you should have read the third course out of... Read More

DIY SEO

Part 1. Wordtracker for keywords.A problem for all new webmasters... Read More

So, Where Has Your Search Engine Been Today?

Visit Google, Yahoo, MSN or one of the lesser search... Read More

Increase Your Link Popularity for Free

Among the many things you need to worry about for... Read More

Search Engine Updates vs. SEO

Webmasters always anxiously wait for a search engine update. Those... Read More

How Do I Improve My Web Site Conversion Rate? Part 1

Question 1.What do you mean by conversion? Do you mean... Read More

Submit Your WebSite: Add Your URL to Web Directories & Search Engines

Why get into Search engines and directories?Increase backlinks of your... Read More

Meta Tags Help Optimize Your Web Site Rankings

Are you working on getting your web site up onto... Read More

Black Hat SEO and the Sneaky Redirect

Are shades of grey SEO really Black Hat SEO?Black hat... Read More

How To Get Listed In Google For Free

Google does not accept payment for inclusion in their main... Read More

Website Promotion: 10 Search Engine Optimization Blunders to Avoid

If you want to develop a successful search engine optimization... Read More

Find Best Keywords For Your Site

Keyword optimisation is probably the most important thing that you... Read More

DMOZ: Rotten To The Core

I knew things were bad at DMOZ. But I guess... Read More

Search Engine Optimization Lies & Misconceptions

In a perfect world, everyone would be honest.In a perfect... Read More

Tops In Toolbars?

Most internet marketers are aware of, and probably use, the... Read More

Top Search Engine Ranks, Part 2- Mastering the Secret- Explained

In the first part of this series on ranking at... Read More

How To Rank High On MSN Search

The new MSN Search is quickly gaining popularity among internet... Read More

Are Your SEO Efforts Going To Waste?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a long and complicated process... Read More

Search Bots, Crawlers, and Spiders

If you are a webmaster and you review your logs,... Read More

How To Find Good Keywords

Good keywords are frequently searched for (high demand) but not... Read More

The Search Engine Of The Future: Mobility Has A Pricetag

We all know the ease of using a search engine... Read More