Why no one's searching for your Web 2.0 site [Silicon Valley Users Guide]

Published: November 6, 2007, 1:55 pm

Tags: search, silicon valley users guide

You've built a shiny new website. But Google's steadfastly ignoring you. Why? SearchEngineLand's Chris Silver Smith has the explanation. Your Ajax-ridden site couldn't lasso a search engine spider if it stood there blinking at you. Here's what you need to do to cajole Google and Yahoo's robotic Web-crawlers over to your site, and get them to feast on its contents.When you link away from your homepage, do not link to a redirect. If you must, make sure it's not a 302 "temporary" redirect but a 301 "Permanent" redirect. Links that pop up into menus when a mouse hovers over them are not accessible to spiders. Links dynamically written into the page using JavaScript also lock out search-engine spiders. A sharp site with a clue? Wikimapia.org. It looks like it's in Ajax only, but look deeper and you'll see they've exposed all their unique content through HTML, the best spider-bait there is. Bar none. What not to do? A few paticularly bad examples are housingmaps.com, mywikimap.com and

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