SEO challenge

Go to google and type in "allinurl:www.mycompany.com" it will list all the pages in your site that have been spidered.

Let us know your domain name and we may be able to help you further.

thanks - the domain is italianwinesdirect.com and one of the links I'm meant to submit is http://www.italianwinesdirect.com/isroot/italianwinesdirect/ExportMetaTags/products/productindex.html

This will take you to a page with links particular to the products within our shop. I tried your suggestion and is came up as 1 for the main domain and 0 for the exported metatag link

I *think* that because the page has no real content, google may actually treat that as a spam link. It would be much better off organised like a proper sitemap. I do a very similar thing on my website (ipodx), however I have placed it within my main template with descriptions as well, and I know that google has spidered it.

so you think that google automatically rejects this link due to the lack of content and that we have to create a site map based on the links and have this linked to the main site?

it's never easy.....How about if this is just linked to the homepage, would the spiders just see it as an extension of the site?

Your main site URL re-directs - not a good thing. And the page it re-directs to uses frames. Not a show-stopper, but not a good choice.

You can continue to use these forums and others to get some help, but I strongly suggest you get some serious professional help for your site.

The company you are working with either does not know or does not care about real search engine optimization and the solution you have paid for is not going to help much if the pages are not optimized correctly.

I just looked at one product page and it had this title:

<.title>Wine Product Template

Oh, my gosh, I just looked at what they have created for you...!!! It's a huge links page that is pure crap. It's not even a poor excuse for a site map. Who want's to have visitors land on THAT?!!?

Then, if you click on a link it takes you to a short (ugly-no links/design)page with some bad optimization that has a META REFRESH tag, that then takes you to a page that looks like this:
http://www.italianwinesdirect.com/epages/italianwinesdirect.storefront/EN/Product/1101

that is more trash...

I am sorry to tell you all this, but you have been given very bad advice/service, in my opinion as a professional SEO. Would someone else here that also does SEO see if you agree with what I am saying...?

I would contact seopros.org and get them to have some of their members give you some analysis and quotes to get things fixed up for you. One of the options is to take your existing site and make it search engine friendly without creating additional pages, even if they were to look good.

I would demand every cent back that was spend towards "optimizing" your site. If you have to take them to court, you could easily get a professional SEO to testify that what they did was at best a waste of time, and at worst, has HURT YOUR SITE MORE THAN HELPED....

Thanks,
Chris Nielsen

I totally agree with Christian on this one!

many thanks for your help and your honest opinion. Firstly though, in defense of the company that we worked with, this solution wasn't designed by them. And since we've been working with them we've more than quadrupled the traffic and tripled sales. However, we're not working with them anymore.

We inherited the site with the frames and this is the main problem. Also the page that you are talking about (the links page) has been developed by a major software developer. The thought behind it was to export the dynamic pages to static html pages and ensure that after submission of the url (I provided) the page would then redirect to the main product page. I agree that the redirect isn't pretty. Our potential customers weren't meant to see the links page - this was to make it easier for the submission to the search engine rather than submit over 100 urls.

Isn't the problem that as it's in frames the site won't be crawled apart from the homepage and therefore is there any point in having metatags at all let alone having one such as <.title>Wine Product Template.

Now, the purpose is that we either ditch the links page (which is what I'm close to doing and try for something else) Or we try and make the links page into a site map that will be presentable but will always have the redirect) Our problem is that at the moment, we can only target certain keywords because the search engines don't see the rest of the content on the site - we are top page in google for "Italian wine" and "italian wines" but need to start using further key words such as chianti etc. Can we do this with the site as it is?

Some search engines can crawl frames, but you have to put in Javascript to "re-frame" the pages if they should click on a link to a page that needs to be framed to have navigation.

If you do this, then every page needs to be optimized for what the content is.

Drop the major software developer and work with a SEO company. They might suggest a solution where you would need a developer, but you need SEO expertise.

My advice, with what I know about your site would be this:

1) Remove the extra stuff that has been added.

2) Redesign the site without frames, but if that is not practical, then leave them.

3) Have the site optimized, and see if the SEO can suggest another method to make your site more "SE Friendly" by converting the site URLs to remove or reduce the use of "?" and "&" and other dynamic elements. May not be hard or expensive.

4) Add Javascript to "re-frame" any framed pages that a user may land on. Simple.

5) Create a site map AFTER the site is optimized.

6) Google and other crawler-based systems will find your site, but submit to as many other places as possible, including Froogle.com.

I can't think of anything else at the moment...

many thanks for all your help - I've already taken the decision to seek alternative help.