Geeklog Forums

i have a geeklog powered site for some time now, but it looks like google and other search engines dont register my site, or index its pages. can anyone suggest something? thanks

This could be for several reasons, but I think it is because Google & co can't find youre site. Did you submit youre site allready? Is there someone linking to youre site?

It could also be that you just aren't accepted by Google (but you really have to suck if they do that).

If youre site is new and you just submited it, than it can take a week or so before Google crawls it.

Sorry for the bad English.

grtz

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dimis-site.be

Try to add some meta tags, these should be added in header.thtml of the default theme.

You can do that, but the mayor search engine don't make much of those tag much or I thing they even ignore them. But you could do that, there's always a chance it works.

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dimis-site.be

Or also use the siteindex.php script (you can find it by a site search for siteindex).

BTW Google doesn't look at the metatags, only the title and the content.

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Dutch Geeklog sites about camping/hiking:
www.kampeerzaken.nl | www.campersite.nl | www.caravans.nl | www.caravans.net

Have you checked your logfiles to see if Googlebot has even visited your site yet?

In my experience, Geeklog sites are indexed just fine - sometimes even better than expected.

For example, the site that I posted about here was visited by Googlebot a mere 16 hours after that post (which means that Googlebot reads the forums, as that was the only existing link to that site at that point) and it showed up in Google search results less than 48 hours after the original post.

As the others have already pointed out, meta tags are pretty much ignored these days, although Google sometimes still uses the meta description (in fact it did for the site mentioned above).

bye, Dirk

thank you guys.
i will try the siteindex.php and some of the suggestions you gave.
thanks again,
anaon

The only problem is that Google links more into outdated headlines pages instead of to the individual articles...

To make Googlebot read the actual articles, turn the story's headline into a link (in the story template files):

The class is there to disable underlining of the link (put that in your style.css):

You could also put H1 tags around it (Googlebot loves headlines):

And, again, some CSS to not make it stand out so much:

bye, Dirk

By saying "headlines" I meant "Intro Text".
I'm not sure, but I think you thought I only use "Intro Text" and that's why I have no links.

Well, most of my articles use a "Body Text" too, which means those articles already appear in link forms.

So I don't understand what exactly would your suggestion do?

Google can index GeekLog 1.3.9 as is without modification. Other bots may need help with search engine optimization. If you have no content, bad content or a page rank of 0, no one will index your site no matter what.

The thing is I have almost every page indexed by Google, including headlines pages, submission pages, vote pages and whatnot. Just not the articles themselves.

See the tip I gave above. Adding a link to the article page makes it much more likely that Googlebot will index it.

Also, switch on the URL rewriting, if possible.

bye, Dirk

I still don't understand what it means to "add a link to the article page"?

And url rewriting doesn't work for me.

I was talking about article.php, i.e. the page where the (entire) story is displayed on its own.

The index page of a typical Geeklog site is always changing. So between the time a spider indexes that page and the time it shows up in the search engine, it usually has already changed. This can be frustrating for visitors who come searching for a particular topic that has already dropped off the front page.

With the above trick, we'll make sure spiders also find the article page (which has a static URL) and direct visitors to the content they're looking for.

This is especially useful for stories that only have an intro text, since the link to the article page is hard to find for those stories. But it also makes sense for stories with a body text, as a link that includes the story's headline is much more likely to be picked up (and indexed properly) by spiders than one that only reads "read more".

bye, Dirk

Oh..........all you meant was that instead of calling the link "Read More", it would call it by the article's name?
If so, wouldn't it look funny to people in the index pages?

As for url rewriting, I use Apache, but whenever I enable it and then try to click on an aticle I get an "Internal Server Error".
The output from my site's error log is then:
[error] [client whatever] Premature end of script headers: /mysite/cgi-bin/php

I must be talking Chinese or something ...

Every story has a story title. See storytext.thtml - it's the {story_title} variable. My suggestions was to change that (as described above) so that it links to the article page. That is in addition to a "read more" link (which isn't even there when the story only consists of an intro text).

As I tried to explain, search engines are more likely to follow links that have some meaningful content (like, in this case, the story title).

bye, Dirk

Dirk-San, I think I got you...all you meant was there there will be two idenical links:
1) Just like always, the regular one - "Read more" (if there is a "body text", of course).
2) The new addition, which will turn the standard text titles into links. And therefore even "intro text" only articles would have a link to them!

I think I'll use it. Would you consider making it official in future versions?

And what about the url rewriting bug?

Thanks!

Yep.



Geeklog 1.3.10 will come with a new default theme that uses this.


Good question. Must be a server configuration problem, as it usually works with Apache.

Is this your own server? Apache 1.3 or 2?

bye, Dirk

Here's what I could find:
Server software = Apache/1.3.26