webby2
Member
hi, I am finding it odd that Google has indexed all the pages in my sites apart from the events themselves and have looked everywhere in the code for something that my block google and cannot find anything.
I have even submitted Google sitemap to webmaster tools to no avail!
The URLS are unique e.g. http://brisguide.com/events/100356/jobserve-bristol/
Any ideas would be welcomed!
Thanks for a great plugin.
Franky
Key Master
Ever thought about asking google first?
Franky - 99% of the posts/pages in my site are indexed by google.
These are in my sitemap generated by the Google XML Sitemaps plugin.
The page featuring the events is also indexed but I can't get them to index any of the actual events pages.
I manually added http://www.plainandsimple.tv/events to my sitemap a week ago but it's not picking that up.
Is there a way to hook into that plugin or a way to generate a 2nd sitemap for the events?
Thanks,
Tom
Franky
Key Master
I don't know that plugin, but I'm guessing it only indexes posts and pages. Events are not posts, so ...
I know that but that's the issue (I believe) with the OP and myself, which results in all other pages getting indexed except the events.
The RSS exists so is it possible to extend that section to create XML for an events sitemap also?
Disclaimer: I don't know enough about SEO to know that's the issue but seem strange that all posts are being indexed but events aren't. Can anyone else give examples where this is the same/different?
Thanks
Franky
Key Master
@webby2: I don't believe that google doesn't index the events, if I search for "site:brisguide.com" in google, I find some references to events. So google indexing works.
Again: if you think google should index your site but it doesn't: contact google and discuss it with them.
If I try this: site:www.plainandsimple.tv/events there's nothing.
If I try this: site:www.plainandsimple.tv/ there's 822 results.
Each new post is indexed by google within a couple of hours so I'm surprised that they've not indexed a single event with some having been published at least 2 weeks ago.
All single event pages are under: http://www.plainandsimple.tv/events so I don't see why google are missing them.
I suspect it's because they're not in my sitemap.xml which was why I'm asking if it's possible to get a list of the events - maybe a feature request.
@webby2 - I see in your sitemap that you do actually have the single events listed and are indexed by google.
Please could you tell me how you did that?
Thanks
Tom
admintiger
Member
This is an eme support forum, rather than a search engine optimization forum. However, maybe Franky won't object to the somewhat off-subject explanation below because it addresses issues any eme user who wants good search engine rankings should understand.
Search engines rarely assign much importance to pages that do not have significant amounts of reasonably well-written text composed of complete sentences with proper punctuation. Furthermore, to be ranked as important, most of the text on a page should pertain to an obvious common subject that is clearly identified in the heading.
After scoring the importance of a page according to that and other criteria, links from the page are each assigned a percentage of the page's importance. The more outgoing links there are from a page, the less importance each link will have. (I have used the term "importance" here to generalize the explanation. The importance score is given different names by different search engines. )
Go to your http://www.plainandsimple.tv/club-listings/club-listings-house/ page, view the page source code, and you will see what search engine bots analyze when deciding how much importance to give each of the links from that page to your event pages.
What is the percentage of well written English text on that page compared to total page content? Imagine that the page wasn't yours and you were asked to rate the apparent importance of English text on that page compared to the importance of English text on other internet website pages that you consider to have valuable textual content. How would you score that page's relative importance?
Now count the number of links from that page to other pages and divide the importance score you gave that page by the number of links. How much importance would you be able to distribute to each link? The links on a page don't usually each receive equal importance distributions, because other factors such as their position on a page, link text, etc., affect distributions. However, the more outbound links a page has the less importance each link has, because they are each assigned some percentage of the total page score.
Many other things could be done to increase the apparent importance of your event pages as search bots will score them, but two extremely important changes you could make would be to greatly increase the amount of well written webpage text and greatly reduce the number of outgoing links. Every outgoing link (including menu links) reduces the importance of all the other outbound links. Cut the number of outbound links in half and the remaining links will be weighted twice as important. However, unless a page has a significant amount of well written text, it has insignificant value to divide among its outbound links so both those issues must be addressed before either of them will be important.
Thanks for taking the time to write a very informative post. That's very useful to know.
The nature of that page does mean there will always be a high number of links unfortunately but I take on board what you are saying.
I guess the final question though is whether it is possible to publish the events in XML to use as a 2nd sitemap.
The OP appears to have found a way to include the events in his sitemap: http://brisguide.com/sitemap.xml
but I suspect this was done manually.
Thanks again,
Tom
webby2
Member
Finally one of my 2000+ events has actually been indexed by Google.
I did that sitemap with a generator which should prove there are no issue with robots being able to index the pages.
I just thought there must be something in the code of the events page template that was stopping Google indexing.
Anyway thanks for all replies, if I uncover anything I will update.
For anyone interested, here was my ugly solution around this:
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