Search engine/robot question

[Christylh]

Are all pages within Actinic Catalog searchable by web spiders/robots?

Also I do not notice the meta keywords showing up in the source code that I did edit into the section via the meta tag tab.

Anyone help?

Thanks!

[cdicken]

Yes, Actinic pages are spiderable once you get the spider into the index page in the 'acatalog' folder. All the links are then just normal hyperlinks and all the pages are static. What most people do is register both their home page address and their acatalog folder address with Google.

The meta content you enter in Actinic shows up within the pages in the store. THe meta content you enter in 'Edit | Catalog Details' is just used on the front page of the store. You can then enter Meta Tags in for the sections in the store.

[GFK]

In general, it is thought in the SEO community that it's better to "let" Google find you than to register.

Google scores sites that it locates itself by following hyperlinks higher than those which register, on the basis that it is more likely to find respected sites with relevant content by following such links, and the more inbound links there are to a site, the more likely it is to have high quality, relevant content - and the more likely spidering is to locate such sites.

It is worth registering with some of the other SEs, though, and bear in mind that they do share data - GoTo, Lycos and DMOZ are all worth a manual submission.

Whatever you do, avoid submission engines like the plague.

[pinbrook]

Yes, Actinic pages are spiderable once you get the spider into the index page in the 'acatalog' folder.


Why aren't the links on the index page created by brochure spiderable?

[cdicken]

Jo

I have reported this to the development team after our last discussion about it. It was done in this way so there would be one link which worked equally well for logged in customers and non-logged in customers. I have asked them to come up with an alternative solution for a future release.

For now, you will have to use the brochure linking feature to create a fragment with a URL that goes to the 'acatalog' folder.

[pinbrook]

Hi Chris

I've attached a screen dump. This shows a virgin clean v6 (out of the box) with a supplied brochure index page. If you look the the spiderable links you will see the problem I am talking about.

[pinbrook]

I have now added 4 links to the brochure page

1 acatalog/index.html
2 product link to calculator
3 section link to products with a range of options
4 http://www.pinbrook6.co.uk/acatalog/index.html

then run simspider

results are attached

site is located at www.pinbrook6.co.uk

simspider (http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi)

[pinbrook]

And if I upload SiteRoot_index.html

i get the following

[pinbrook]

Wadaya think?

[jarroyo]

What I have done when using actinic has been to create a new index page going into the site rather than using Actinic's generated page. I have more control and copy the site index and use it as a menu into the site. There are a greater variety of links going into the site and I can change the directions I am leading customers whenever I wish. You can see what I mean at:

http://www.raineandshine.com

By the way, thanks for the info on the simspider! That is one awesome tool!

[pinbrook]

I create my own index file too.

The point I am trying to make to actinic here, is the inadequacies of the brochure page.

[jarroyo]

I agree 100%

I don't like the way that the brochure pages operates as if it were a completely different site. The site map does not include the brochure pages in the catalog so that I have to refer back to the Index which I create to get them back into the brochure and have to do a 'song and dance' to return to the catalog from the brochure. I would like to have a menu, like the one that NorTree creates and I use on the catalog, to include the brochure pages!

Such is a world to compromises!

[pinbrook]

a solution is to embed the link into the text box of the fragment dialog box

thus

!!<<a href="/acatalog/index.html">link </a>>!!

and ignore the link bit