How can i stop google doing this

[bowers01 +]

Hi,
If i type truck and machinery into google.com.au i used to come up first in the results. I now dont i am a few pages in and it took me a while to figure it out. But google is coming up with truckandmachinery.com.au/category.php?cat=trucks instead of the index page so i have no meta tags or keywords.
How can i make google come up with my index page first?
Attached is a screen shot of the results if it helps.
Cheers,
Nick

[Mike-N-Tosh +]

Have you created and submitted a sitemap to Google? That might help if you haven't.

-Mike

[bowers01 +]

Hi,
Yes i have using the 68c Sitemap module.
Any Ideas?
Cheers,
Nick

EDIT: I also noticed that the index page is not the first one on the sitemap. If the main pages where at the top of the sitemap would that help?

[Lhotch +]

Originally Posted by bowers01

Hi,
If i type truck and machinery into google.com.au i used to come up first in the results. I now dont i am a few pages in and it took me a while to figure it out. But google is coming up with truckandmachinery.com.au/category.php?cat=trucks instead of the index page so i have no meta tags or keywords.
How can i make google come up with my index page first?
Attached is a screen shot of the results if it helps.
Cheers,
Nick

Google, like most search engines, match content of your pages up to search results.

If you search for "truck and machinery" and google displays a page on your site other than the sites home page that means that google (or what ever search engines) thinks that your other page is more relvent to "truck and machinery" than the index of your site.

You are running a classified site where users can post ads, this means that the content of your site will be very dynamic and you will have little to no control over the contents of the various categories etc. Logic would dictate that as you get more ads the categories and other pages of your site will have a higher value than the index page of your site.

As for what page of google your site appears on, the internet is not static, it changes all the time and because of this so will your placement. So unless you plan on spending your whole day, every day, keeping your site at the top it likely wont stay there.

Ive said it before and I will say it again if you rely on SE placement for the majority of your trafi your setting yourself up to fail.

[seymourjames +]

Nick,

Unless I m being thick, I cannot see how you get to that categories page from your index page to start in a nice east way unless you do a search and then pick up on the breadcrumb from a listing. It seems in reverse to me.

[bowers01 +]

Well i guess google has found the categories in the sitemap? because i have since removed the categories from the front page, it just has the Maffo search module.
Cheers

[seymourjames +]

It is not good to have important pages which are orphaned from an SEO perspective. When google indexes a site it looks to see how friendly it is in terms of its linking structure. Having clear links to categories which then link onwards show Google that your site is easy to navigate. Resilts from searches are orphaned pages with little value. Google will almost certainly ignore them unless they are being referenced from somewhere like an external link to a url which is the result of a search and even then they are pretty smart at catching someone who tries to abuse this by making thousands of searches and thousands or urls.

[bowers01 +]

Ok, Thanks for the reply. I just changed the robots.txt to let google index category pages.
Nick