nofollow on the listings and some categories?

[gadgit7]

Hi All,

First up a public thank you to David Seymour for his efforts in fixing the seo bug

Now...I have just done a site analysis and have found that all the listings have a 'nofollow' restriction on them somehow and a few of the category pages have the same.

Here's what I got...



how do i get the listings to have a follow attribute so they are seen by google?

Thanks

[seymourjames]

Some people have to ask difficult questions LOL

The templatecodes system (templates and modules) is special in regard to SEO. It is one of the great benefits of using it.

It has been designed so certain urls are 'nofollow' like userjoin, login, contact , etc. You should also put these urls into a robots.txt file so they are 'nofollow' as well to be certain. We don't distribute a robots.txt file because to be frank, people should be doing their own. They may have a whole range of pages they do not want to have indexed for whatever reason. Why have a search engine dilute what it thinks about your overall site as several other hundred people have the same pages - userjoin, contact, etc. They hardly contain useful information from a search engines perspective. These pages are worthless in SEO terms and will probably be seen as duplicate content too (possible penalty - nobody is ever sure or knows).

Now the viewlistings and categories are a different matter.

You can remove the nofollow from the plugins and template files in the templatezones module (that is where they are set) but there is a good reason for it being like that.

SEO was my subject and one of the things about the templatecodes system is it guides a search engine to go through the whole structure of your site in an ordered nanner. The way "I" prefer it to do it having had some success in this area. Otherwise a search engine comes to your site and it runs off immediately to some obscure advert after reading a few lines of code. Is that what you want to say is important about your site - probably not. What the underlying structure of our templates does is take a search engine through pages of general importance (like a hierarchy), going to lower priority pages at each pass. For example, in principle it will go to browse page before an individual category or individual advert. It will find those after when it has got the browse page, category pages, etc. What search engines rarely do is index every page on your site in one go and put them in their results - it builds up over time; so make it easy for them to determine the most important pages in your site.

What the tc_sitemap module does for them is provide an overall map of the current site and importantly, when updates to urls were last made. This last point is important because it tells search engines not to crawl a url when it already knows the content. It saves a job and you probably win a few brownie points. It is only interested in new content at the end of the day. Things that have changed or new urls which are created. It knows the extent of the site too having a complete map of it. You can also put guidance into the xml generated sitemap about what urls you think it should prioritise.

What used to be done with the templatecodes system in addition (no longer) is to attach proper title tags to all internal links. The reason why this is not done since the original Nustyle template is that nearly every file in the defalut template would need to be touched and this just makes upgrade and support impractical. However, those that want to SEO their site should think about doing this.

I cannot over emphasize what SEO is really about though - its 50% about CONTENT, 40% what others (which others too) think of it and 10% internal structure - see the sticky.

[gadgit7]

Thats a great response James and much appreciated

I will follow what you have learned then and leave well alone. With the SEO bug now fixed the pages are being indexed now and the sitemap will lead the way to the new listings.

Sorry to ask a hard question...just being thorough

Gaz

[seymourjames]

No problem. It is just a big subject but at the same time it is a small one. There is no easy way to good search engine rankings. Once the links are in place it is a case of Content. Not any old content but unique content of value. Then get others who are considered by the search engines to be relevant to tell the search engine that you are relevant too. Its quite laughable but I can give you a good example. I built a site and used every trick I could find to try and achieve a page one position on a moderately competitive term. I took months doing it.

I never got to page 1.

My wife on the other hand who knows nothing about SEO , made a site on a slightly more competitive term Reflexologie Plaintaire and got page 1 in a good position. The reason is that she wrote naturally for people and the content is first class.

My honest opinion is that a classified website will benefit greatly by the quality of content it provides. You can do much if you spend some time on your home page and add extra pages which are high up in the hierarchy (linked from your home page).