Google - page descriptions awful!

[sfatula]

I have searched far and wide on google for product_info.php pages. 99% of them have junk, or the category menu, or other useless stuff.

 

While there has been tons of discussion on how to remove SIDs, etc., the result is you get a horrible listing on google. You get your page title, and you get the category menu, or the find box.

 

Google SEEMS to take the first test it finds. Unfortunately, this seems to include the left menu bar, which has useless stuff on it for a real good listing.

 

Do, do people have methods for making this come out a little better? Any suggestions?

[wizardsandwars]

Please throughly read through all of the previous Google discussions.

 

There are quite a few very specific examples of people that have had products listed successfully.

[mattice]

Just checked that too and you are right, none of them have descent descriptions....

 

Since Google doesn't seem to take the META-Description the only 'cure' I can think of is to make sure there is actually some text making sense BEFORE the categories... but that text would need to be visible...

so the header is the only place. You could create a bgcolor-ed table cell inthere and use text in the same color so it's not visible. But then again search engines seem to punish you for doing that. ...

 

:(

[burt]

Google will index every word on your page. So if (for example) you had a good description, you would get the same page result but with different highlighted terms...

 

No potential customer would ever search for product_info.php?products_id in google...becuse you are searching for it, it means that google has nothing to work on whatsoever which is why you are seeing the same sorts of things for every entry.

 

Eg:

 

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&ie=UT..._info.php&meta=

 

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&ie=UT...le+Search&meta=

 

Same page for both, now look totally different on the search....

 

Hope that makes sense...

[sfatula]

Chris, please read my question! I did not ask about getting pages listed. I read ALL 17 pages on the recent large google discussion. I clicked on the sample links people through out, including you, and the descriptions are terrible. I did not find ANY posted google search that showed a useful description for the page.

[mattice]

Google will index every word on your page. So if (for example) you had a good description, you would get the same page result but with different highlighted terms...

 

No potential customer would ever search for product_info.php?products_id in google...becuse you are searching for it, it means that google has nothing to work on whatsoever which is why you are seeing the same sorts of things for every entry.

 

Eg:

 

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&ie=UT..._info.php&meta=

 

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&ie=UT...le+Search&meta=

 

Same page for both, now look totally different on the search....

 

Hope that makes sense...

 

:oops: That's true, never thought of that. Need more coffee. Or sleep. Or both.

[wizardsandwars]

Ahh-Hmmnn (clears throat)

 

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=...eron%27s+call+2

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=...ars+neverwinter

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=...ndwars+tribunal

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=...dwars+morrowind

 

I'm sure it was just an oversight.

[sfatula]

Ah yes, I see I am an idiot now. Thanks for pointing it out Burt!

 

Ok, my site finally showed up in Google today, no SID at least. Search engine friendly, which I am now converting from as some engines HATE search engine friendly, apparently it is not always friendly. Zyborg is one, it looped on the search engine friendly style. Had to write a little code though to still accept the friendly style as I did not want to start over! Overall, I am not so sure friendly looks any better anyway.

 

Anyway, looks like I forgot to have good page titles, all of mine have the company name. Oh well, next version... At least I have a good Robots.txt file now. It took a lot of work to get Google to go fast on my site.

 

Thanks to all for pointing out that it does work.

[wizardsandwars]

:wink: :wink: :wink: :wink:

[Ian-San]

Suddenly, something has gone right :shock:

 

Last month, I just had the Ian C sid killer but still got 75,000 pointless listings on Google (I believe the sid killer worked but Google didnt clear out the old listings).

 

So I reinstalled the html_output mods that we have endlessly discussed and now I get reasonable results with just a few hundred listings! e.g. Search for Bekkio gives:

 

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=...G=Google+Search

 

and search for NowSayit gives:

 

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=...=all&q=nowsayit

 

In the second case, all the entries including the Japanese text are mine:

 

So, I strongly recommend using BOTH Ian C's mod and the html_output mods plus having some text to index.

 

Given that 2 months ago we were fighting Google as it indexed the site continuously for 72 hours, I think we have come a long way and shown that OS can work with Google.

[wizardsandwars]

Ian-San,

 

I was wondering if you had any problems with the BUY NOW button when using Ian's code?

 

It seems that there were a few others that had this problem.

[Ian-San]

I was wondering if you had any problems with the BUY NOW button when using Ian's code?

 

I think it may have been one reason for multiple listings last month but not sure. However, as soon as I noticed that the listings were not reducing, I re-installed the html_output mod and the combination of both solutions seems to have worked. I realise that this is heavy on cpu time but I havent noticed any problem.

 

Now that the thousands of rubbish listings have gone, I can see from the titles of those left that I did actually have many good listings last month but that they were hidden at the end of the crap.