Creating a Directory and want to be sure its SEO Friendly

[gurujh]

Hi All,

I recently decided to create a Link Directory (http://www.linkiguana.com) to help others get spidered easier with the major engines.

After Looking at tons of scripts, portals and programs, I chose one that was the most search engine friendly, and even had the author make changes to the code to make sure links would be followed.

Can you take a look at the site and give me your opinions? The site is not even a week old and I am getting a good response from it, however there are some members that although are using it, complain of this and that.

Example, they complain that the page 8_business.html will not be spidered by Google. I know this NOT to be the case because checking from my server logs I see that Google did INDEED spider that page, along with every other page in the directory. Its not that Google does not spider a page with a underscore, its that if your trying to target a keyword and use the underscore to separate it, Google will treat it as one word.

So far I have spent well over a couple of grand on this project, just to have a few try to shoot it down:furious:. I value your opinions, so I would appreciate it if a few of you could take a look.

Please take a look at my link directory (http://www.linkiguana.com) and let me know what you think. I have worked long and hard on this. Thanks.

[GByte]

Hi Guru

Looking over you site I see no reason why the whole site would'nt get crawled by google as you have already proved. One thing I will say though is that I am not sure that they will follow the outgoing links to sites listed because of the links being a cgi script e.g clicking on a listed site takes you through http://www.linkiguana.com/directory/out.cgi?id=31 to get to their site rather than a direct link to their domain.

But please dont take my word for it, somebody else here will be able to clarify this.

[gurujh]

[QUOTE=GByte]Hi Guru

Looking over you site I see no reason why the whole site would'nt get crawled by google as you have already proved. One thing I will say though is that I am not sure that they will follow the outgoing links to sites listed because of the links being a cgi script e.g clicking on a listed site takes you through http://www.linkiguana.com/directory/out.cgi?id=31 to get to their site rather than a direct link to their domain.

But please dont take my word for it, somebody else here will be able to clarify this.[/QUOTE]

Hey GByte,

I was worried about that too, so I had the the author add to the code for a regular href link as well. Example, a few lines down after the out.cgi?id=31 there is also this: <a href='http://www.absolutepromotion.com'onMouseOver="window.status
(not from the same example that you chose, but Im positive that the code is there for that site too.)

However, now that we are on the subject, the author of the script I am using was very passionate about the dynamic link being followed, and was greatly annoyed I asked for the additional code. Anyone have any experience with the dynamic links being spidered? I wanted to cover all my bases, so its doing both a bit of dynamic linking as well as good old fashion static linking as well.

Thanks for the input!

[Cecil]

Using asp, I've had some pages with a ?tag that designates the status of our navigation tabs. As it turns out, I've noticed one page actually pops up with a different PR when the navigation tag is included in the URL than when it is just the straight URL. I'm thinking that the spider found the link via different links on the site (one which includes the navtag and one which would not include it). Haven't really torn the thing apart yet but suspicious nonetheless.

(quick summation...yeah, it will get there if your link sends the spider...and it differentiates the page from from others with different tags...or the absence of a tag)

[seoquestion123]

[QUOTE=GByte]Hi Guru

Looking over you site I see no reason why the whole site would'nt get crawled by google as you have already proved. One thing I will say though is that I am not sure that they will follow the outgoing links to sites listed because of the links being a cgi script e.g clicking on a listed site takes you through http://www.linkiguana.com/directory/out.cgi?id=31 to get to their site rather than a direct link to their domain.

But please dont take my word for it, somebody else here will be able to clarify this.[/QUOTE]


I've seen other sites that use cgi's on links. Can someone tell me more about this? For example, is it looked at unfaborably by the search engines? Does it get penalized? Why can't the search engine follow it?