Discuss Search Engine Optimizing, Stats

[Guest sunshine]

Hi Everyone,

Checked the forums here and haven't seen a great deal of talk on SEO for PHP. I' just checked my stats and in the past week they've dropped to at, or just below a 1/3 of what it was 8days ago.

I don't have many pages but the latest seems to be indexed ok IF it's indexed. Google of course doesn't know I exist but I better not to push anything until I'm completely live then again, I also know better than to let myself fall off into never-web-land. My stats are also showing exits at virtually 100% now so I've definately got to speed my workings up and finish. What brought this? Ideas? I'm trying to understand. Any advice? */*

[Guest jeromas]

One of the best things you can do is find sites relative to the content on your site, and ask for a mutual link exchange, ie you place a link on your site to their site and they place a link to your site on theirs. Doing so has the effect of giving you web traffic without having to place high in a search engine ranking.

It can take some legwork to find sites relevant to yours and that are willing to exchange links (especially if you have a Google PR of 0), but a polite contact to the webmaster of the site never hurt. I'd say on average about 30% of the webmasters I asked exchanged links with me, and I can definitely see the benefit when checking AWstats. As well, having relative content links to your site from the outside helps your PR. After about 4 months of having my (old) site live, I ended up with a PR of 5, and decent search engine ranking on some of the terms I was shooting for. Of course I changed the domain name and now have a PR of 0 for my current site, but oh well, here I go again.

Another thing you can do is prepare a site map of your store, ie links to all the pages, sublinks, etc. Googlebot likes sitemaps, and will eagerly follow links found on them, as it make the pages easy to index.

One idea I had would be for CubeCarters to have a page with links to other CubeCart stores somewhere on their site. Anyone in this ring of links would have the same amount of links pointing to their store as anyone else, helping everybody get more traffic. Just a thought.

Lots of other stuff you can do for SEO. Check Google out as well -- they have a ton of useful information.

[roban]

There is a mod available called search engine friendly mod for CC 3.02 that is worth checking out. You'll find it in the Downloads section.

I have done a lot of Google Site Maps for CC stores and have reports that products are found more easily and in greater numbers than before it was implemented. Backlinks to and from relevent sites is important as is content and keyword optimization. One of the biggest factors is 'time'. It takes 6 months at least for a site to show progress. Other things to consider are 'alt' tags for your images as spiders don't crawl images, keyword density and relevency and good title, description and keyword meta tags.

[Guest sunshine]

Hi Jeromas and Roban,

Thank you both for your input and advice. I've been researching and reading up on it. Yep, I'm working on a sitemap aka directory and trying to work on the Site docs simutanteously. Hate writing as I'm really not good at wording things; like talking more

Roban I did see your post on offer for Google Sitemapping. To clarify, is that for Website Directory mapping or Google-mapfeeding?

Jeromas you have some good advice and I will definately follow up with it. Roban, you do of course too.

- The Robots.txt is a must and is already done.

- Spent the night working on an 'if' statement to stop php sessions for robots. I know Rukiman has a good one but I want to try and learn on my own too and figured this would be the best time to do it. Let's just hope I even put it in the right place Sooo hopefully that works out. ;)

[roban]

The site maps are specifically Google Site Maps and require a Google account which is free. My program filters sessions and all errors, creates a robots.txt of its own and has the ability to retrieve Google references already on the Web.

[Guest rukiman]

Roban, can I have a look at your robot.txt file for your cube cart?

[roban]

For you bud, anytime

User-agent: *

Disallow: /index.php?act=login&redir

Disallow: /cart.php?act=reg&redir

Disallow: /index.php?act=taf

[Guest rukiman]

Cheers

Mind if I add it in to my mod? Guess the /admin directory should be there *just" in case?

I am thinking if I run a link checker and look at the links it spiders I can then disallow all other directories that do not appear in the links as they shouldn't be spidered.

i.e

/admin

/classes

/docs

/extra

/includes

/install

/js

/language

/modules

/pear

Just to be extremely safe. What do you think?

[Guest sunshine]

Rukiman,

You can see anyone's Robots.txt. The permissions are NOT 644. All you have to do is type in the url www.lalalal.com/robots.txt

Here's mine

User-agent: * 

# Disallow all crawlers to certain folders.

Disallow: /admin/

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Disallow: /classes/

Disallow: /docs/ 

Disallow: /extra/

Disallow: /includes/

Disallow: /js/

Disallow: /modules/ 

Disallow: /pear/ 



# Disallow all crawlers to certain files. 

Disallow: /.htaccess 

Disallow: /3rdpartylang.inc.php

Disallow: /cart.php

Disallow: /confirmed.php 

Disallow: /download.php

Disallow: /error_log

Disallow: /offLine.php

Disallow: /switch.php

[Guest sunshine]

Roban,

Yes, your Google Sitemapping it will be when I up .

As you can see, I went Disallow crazy.

[Guest rukiman]

Thanks guys. Those sample robot.txt files help a lot.

[Guest sunshine]

:D We help each other ;)

[roban]

@Rukiman

be my guest M8

[Guest rukiman]

Can someone confirm that this robots.txt file is valid for a fresh clean cube cart? Is there a good site that will do a spider simulation taking into account my robots.txt file?

This one doesn't seem to read the robots.txt file?? http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi

# <rf> search engine friendly url mod 



User-agent: * 



# dynamic urls that should not be spidered

Disallow: /index.php?act=login

Disallow: /index.php?act=taf 



# folders that should not be spidered

Disallow: /admin/

Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Disallow: /classes/

Disallow: /docs/ 

Disallow: /extra/

Disallow: /images/

Disallow: /includes/

Disallow: /install/

Disallow: /js/

Disallow: /language/ 

Disallow: /modules/ 

Disallow: /pear/  

Disallow: /skins/



# files that should not be spidered

Disallow: /.htaccess 

Disallow: /cart.php

Disallow: /confirmed.php 

Disallow: /download.php

Disallow: /offLine.php

Disallow: /spiders.txt

Disallow: /switch.php



# <rf> end mod

Anything else missing???

[Guest]

Hello all

Rukiman

Are you working on a updated search engine friendly url mod for cc 3.05 and if so can you give me any idea when it might be ready.

As I would be very interested in using this mod for my site.

Thanks Rachel

[Guest]

Its ok found the post.

Its good what you find if you look ....lol

LOL coming up slow. Been moving house and only downloaded 3.0.5 two days ago and installing it today. Unfortunately merging wasn't as simple as I was hoping as session code has been changed in 3.0.5. 

I'd say give till Fri , Sun at the most 

--------------------

[Guest rukiman]

ok question I have is this if I disallow the /images directory in robots.txt, what does that mean to a search engine?

In cube cart it will make no difference, however if I had some html pages in the /images directory the search engines will not spider them. Is my understanding correct?

[Guest rukiman]

ok worked it out. SEF URL 4.2 is released

[[email protected]]

Why isn`t Tellafriend.php listed in that list of disallow files?

[Guest aikdo]

I agree it should be there without a doubt, search engines punish you for having too many simular links...

Good News is its in v4.3... this post is out dated