BluDomain and difficulty getting indexed by Google
One of the photography forums I spend a lot of time on has a web site board where I tend to camp out. A good percentage of the photographers are using Flash template sites like BluDomain, FlashPalette, or PortfolioSitez which are nice, relatively inexpensive, and fairly easy to setup.
BluDomain goes a step farther with some of their sites and includes an HTML version as well for dial-up visitors and search engines. But the way the splash pages (an entirely different topic) are setup the search engine spiders will never make it to the HTML version.
I’m normally not a fan of splash pages because it’s just one more page to click through to get to content. But in this case it’s a necessary evil. You’re presented with an image along with links to the Flash site and HTML site, and sometimes a blog. The problem is that these links are all JavaScript pop-ups (yet another topic) which the search engine spiders won’t follow.
What got me looking into this is a post where a web site owner had pointed a Google sitemap generator - http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/about-sitemaps.html - towards her site and it wasn’t helping. After looking at the sitemap that was generated we realized that the only page in her sitemap was her home page. None of the HTML pages showed up. Their spider didn’t follow the JavaScript link either.
The way BluDomain sets up their sites is that the HTML version is in a folder called /htmlver/. She went back and created a new sitemap, this time pointing to example.com/htmlver/ instead of example.com and the generator was able to build a full sitemap.
That was last week, and at the time the only page of hers in Google’s index was her home page. Today there are 4. Not a lot by any means, but still 4 times better than what she had.
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