Would like to garner opinions. We've created a website for a gay members club and they wanted the default landing page to mysterious with little information on it.
As such the Default.aspx only contains a form asking for some personal details. Users can click a button to skip this content and go to an AboutUs page.
The problem is, because we cannot control what information Google uses for the site description in search results, it is picking up the forms fields - which obviously do not makes sense as a description.
I think there are two options to counter this:
Use Robots.txt to block access to Default.aspx and only allow access to AboutUs.aspx
Write a description and title in a H1 tag but make the text colour the same as the background colour
Could I get opinions which method people will think is best for search results?
Thanks.
I would not block or try and deceive Google.
Make sure the title tag for the page is good and descriptive. Around 70 characters to explain what the website is about.
Same goes for your meta description. About two sentences to continue on from the title information.
Related
When my website is Googled, I want a search bar for the site to appear in the results, like this:
To be clear, I'm referring to the search bar with the placeholder text "Results from stackoverflow.com", right above the "Careers" and "Java" links.
The results for my website have an identical layout, except that there is no search bar.
How can I achieve a search bar in the results?
**I'm not sure this can be accomplished through altering my source code, so this question may not even belong on StackOverflow. If that is the case, feel free to migrate the question to whichever SE site in which it belongs.
I don't have enough rep to put this in a comment, but i would just like to post this.
Quoting the blog post from google:
How can I mark up my site?
You need to have a working site-specific search engine for your site. If you already have one, you can let us know by marking up your homepage as a schema.org/WebSite entity with the potentialAction property of the schema.org/SearchAction markup. You can use JSON-LD, microdata, or RDFa to do this; check out the full implementation details on our developer site.
If you implement the markup on your site, users will have the ability to jump directly from the sitelinks search box to your site’s search results page. If we don’t find any markup, we’ll show them a Google search results page for the corresponding site: query, as we’ve done until now.
As always, if you have questions, feel free to ask in our Webmaster Help forum.
I've read many links trying to figure out how to tell Google not to index parts of a page. All the answers seem to be no, or do something lame like use IFrames. In our case legal wants a lengthy disclaimer in the footer on every page. This is causing an SEO issue. Any brand new techniques to deal with this?
In our case legal wants a lengthy disclaimer in the footer on every page. This is causing an SEO issue.
No it is not for Google. If it is present on every page, then it will be considered as boiler plate content rather than primary content for the relevancy and indexation of each page. Boiler plate content is ignored for rankings.
Google knows that sometimes content must be written on all pages for legal reasons. It does not penalize such websites dixit John Mueller in his hangout videos.
Currently Google displays elements in the result excerpts that belongs to the functional part of the site. Is there a way to exclude these elements to get crawled/displayed in google?
Like eEdit, eDelete, etc in the example above.
To exclude the pages from Google's index, block them using the Robots.txt file or if it is just the content then use the "rel="nofollow" tag.
Hope this helps.
Update on my particular situation here: I just found out that the frontend code has been generated in a way where the title and the description meta was identical.
Google is smart enough to expect that if a copy is already displayed in the title of the search result there's no reason to add in to the excerpt as well, instead looks for content - believed to be valuable - from the actual page.
Lessons learned:
there's no way to hide elements from google but keep it visible for your users
if you'd like to have control over the content displayed in google searches, avoid using the same copy in your title and description
We are using Liferay as a classic CMS meaning that we compose pages using web content articles. There is an issue with Liferay's internal search I could not yet find a proper answer for:
Because web content articles are pretty much only building blocks for pages we don't want the search to show them as distinct items. The user should only get a list of pages that contain their search keywords, including all the articles put onto this page.
At the moment we can see two different approaches and both come with certain problems we could not solve yet:
Idea 1
We modify the journal indexer and try to obtain all URLs of the pages (how?) where the article has been placed on. Then we add them to the document to be indexed. In the search result we then can access the URLs and collect them. In the end we make sure every URL is only shown once.
Idea 2
At some point Liferay renders the entire page before sending it to the browser. If we somehow could put an indexer there, we could index the entire page. We then could limit the search to the special "page documents". Getting the fully rendered page would be the main issue here, because either we would have to run a crawler to frequently trigger this indexing or we would need to find a way to trigger page rendering from within an indexer or something like that.
I have been carrying this problem around for quite a while now and still could not find an idea good enough to spend time trying it out. If anyone of you has some input on those two ideas or maybe an entirely different approach, I would be extremely grateful.
I'll just answer myself, because by now we found a suitable solution to solve our problem:
In addition to the default search portlet there is also a "Web Content Search Portlet" shipped with Liferay. It seems to have been part of Liferay for quite a while now, but it's somewhat hard to find, because there is hardly any documentation for it (I only found the Liferay wiki page, which isn't really anything at all). It searches only within web content articles and shows links to the pages rather than just a link an isolated view of the article. It has much less configuration options than the default search portlet, however. Pretty much all it allows to change is whether articles actually have to be placed on at least one page to show up in the results.
So there is no need for any kind of custom indexer or any other "hack"...all we need to do is use the correct portlet. We will only need to write a hook that changes the appearance of the result page.
What you ask is interesting but your ideas are on the wrong direction.
Specially idea 2 it's particulary wrong because you cannot do indexing work meanwhile a page is rendered. Think about performace only.
In Liferay pages and assets are not directly linked: pages have portlets and portlets display assets (web content and more).
Liferay indexing refers and scans assets content, not refers the display result of the assets. Think about permission: the same page can display different contents depends on the user who looks.
bye
I have a search engine that searches albums.
For each music album, I have a page.
So, the work flow goes like this:
People search for music titles
The search engine displays a list of albums.
People click on an album to go to a details page.
I want google to index my front page and the details page. I want the details page to be highly ranked. How can I build a sitemap for this?
By the way, I have about 5 million albums (but I want the top 1000 ones to be highly ranked on google)
You would not use a sitemap for that many results. You would want each album to appear as a page with a unique URI to reference that page. That way the search engine can crawl your site by crawling links since search bots cannot submit form data. Each of those URIs should be simple, meaning limited to this part of the URI syntax:
scheme://authority_segment/path
Program your web application to remove and throw away any extraneous data, such as query string or parameters. If you do this you have to be sure that you are watching for URI poisoning or SQL injection even through means of character encoding.
How can I build a sitemap for this?
By pulling the addresses out of your database and creating a XML file with a high priority for some selected pages. Somehow I think that isn’t your real question …
If I wanted to automate building a site map for a site like this, I'd employ Python. I'd pretty much write everything from the ground up (except the data store access). The format is quite simple.
I'm not sure I quite understand your question...