sjwinslow Posted January 12, 2007 Report Share Posted January 12, 2007 I won't belabor this point as I have posted several of my experiences here with Google already. For months I have been trying to get Google to move some of my 14,000 pages out of the supplemental index into their main index with mostly no luck. My primary objective was to get either the getperson.php pages or the customized find.php summary page I developed listed in Google's main index. As my site is still less than a year old this has been an up-hill battle even with my html pages.I recently added a surname meaning database to my site that I have been compiling for over a year. This allowed me to include the surname meaning in the meta description and in the text of the find.php pages I developed. After all of my 10,000 getperson.php and 1,000 find.php pages being excluded from Google's main index for over 7 months, 2 days after the meta description change, 1 of the find.php pages was listed in the main index and now 1 day later another one appeared. I believe that the low number of words normally included in the getperson.php meta description, site age, low quantity of inbound links and click depth are the primary reasons that so many TNG users are not able to keep their pages in Google's primary index. These are a lot of items a new site has to overcome to obtain a good listing with Google these days.Of course, having pages listed in the supplemental index doesn't seem to be as bad as a few months ago. At least supplemental pages can now be found by users if they dig a few pages down in the index or if they include quotes around their search requests.I'm hopeful that my find.php pages will finally emerge from the murk of the suppelmental. It's been very frustrating to put in the work to publish genealogy information that no one can find.Steve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Micheal Mathews Posted January 12, 2007 Report Share Posted January 12, 2007 I won't belabor this point as I have posted several of my experiences here with Google already. For months I have been trying to get Google to move some of my 14,000 pages out of the supplemental index into their main index with mostly no luck. My primary objective was to get either the getperson.php pages or the customized find.php summary page I developed listed in Google's main index. As my site is still less than a year old this has been an up-hill battle even with my html pages.I recently added a surname meaning database to my site that I have been compiling for over a year. This allowed me to include the surname meaning in the meta description and in the text of the find.php pages I developed. After all of my 10,000 getperson.php and 1,000 find.php pages being excluded from Google's main index for over 7 months, 2 days after the meta description change, 1 of the find.php pages was listed in the main index and now 1 day later another one appeared. I believe that the low number of words normally included in the getperson.php meta description, site age, low quantity of inbound links and click depth are the primary reasons that so many TNG users are not able to keep their pages in Google's primary index. These are a lot of items a new site has to overcome to obtain a good listing with Google these days.Of course, having pages listed in the supplemental index doesn't seem to be as bad as a few months ago. At least supplemental pages can now be found by users if they dig a few pages down in the index or if they include quotes around their search requests.I'm hopeful that my find.php pages will finally emerge from the murk of the suppelmental. It's been very frustrating to put in the work to publish genealogy information that no one can find.SteveSteve:I know that we discussed this in depth several months ago, and for what it's worth, I agree completely with what you have written and I have been making the same observations that you have with Google. I am noticing that Google is putting back pages from Supplemental to regular at the rate of one to two a day. I also think that genealogy folks might be finally getting wise to google, because my logs are showing an awful lot of search terms where the use of quotes is being used. That tells me we are starting to see searchers who are finally getting down the nuances of search terms and search usage.I still say that the reason we are having trouble is lack of actual content, and then the content we do have is matched by alot of other genealogy sites out there with names and dates. With all the tweaking and tinkering, Google is still doing something that puzzles me -- I have pages listed in both the site:www.mysite.com and site:mysite.com even though I have asked Google to treat all my pages as www.mysite.com in the Webmasters tools, and I have a redirect to make sure that mysite.com goes to www.mysite.com Why Google can not get this figured out yet is difficult to understand. I know that I have 3048 uri's, but www.mysite.com only shows 849 and mysite.com shows 1048, and I am pretty sure the duplicate penalty is coming into effect. Just dont understand it.All of this and still no Page Rank for a site that is just shy of being a year old. This after the old site got wiped out by the Big Daddy roll out last year. At least I have a number #1 ranking for one of my most searched for people, that makes me happy. Thanks,MichealAll of this and still no Page Rank for a site that is just shy of being a year old. This after the old site got wiped out by the Big Daddy roll out last year. At least I have a number #1 ranking for one of my most searched for people, that makes me happy. Well heck, after writing that, I went over to the site again just to wallow in my pity and what do I see, but that my www.mfhg.org site has a 3/10 page ranking. Now that just happened since this morning.Maybe Google is coming around after all.Micheal Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rush Posted January 12, 2007 Report Share Posted January 12, 2007 Since re-writing to render custom tags(title, keyword, description) for each person and media object, my supplementals have been dumping out and new pages are getting index outside of the supplemental.This could be purely coincidence, but at least it's moving in the right direction. I've learned not to hold my breath with Google as my pages have dumped into the supplemental later.Agreed, I think genealogy pages suffer for lack of content (in general).Rush Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sjwinslow Posted January 12, 2007 Author Report Share Posted January 12, 2007 I'm sure content plays a role but I believe additional information in the Title and Description Meta Tags are critical. Of course you must have the basics in place first. These being site age and inbound links.The reason I'm stressing the Meta Tags is because the find.php pages that have come back for my site have very little content and it is obviously repeated all over the Internet. This is because the find.php pages mostly a directory containing the person's name, birth date/location and spouse. Also within my site, one find.php page looks very similar to another (about a 30% similarity by the seo tools). I believe these pages came back because 1. They are only one click away from my home page, where all of my site's page rank is concentrated. 2. My site is now almost 1 year old and is being given more trust by the search engines (about a month ago Yahoo finally started indexing my pages like crazy, Yahoo now provides more traffic to my site than Google) 3. All the pages from my site that are listed in the main index have very descriptive (and long) meta descriptions and I believe the ones with longer titles do even better.I realize I only have 2 of the find.php pages that have moved from supplemental to the main index but that this happened so quickly after modifying the meta tags is very convincing. Increasing the information in the title and description meta tags is a positive step to being included in the main index that is also borne out by other SEOs. The real problem is first determining how we can get additional information from our getperson.php pages into meaningful unique titles and descriptions. I already have made the modification that adds the persons birth/death date/location to both the title and descriptions of the getperson pages. Although, this is good information for someone viewing a potential person in the search index, I don't believe Google places much weight on all the date information. I have thought about including all of their children's names as well. However, this is a much more involved database search and would still create very similar titles for husband and wife. Additionally, getperson pages on my site are still 2 clicks from my home page and my site may not have adequate page rank and trust to have any hope yet of getting these pages indexed in the main search index.I guess I'll be happy if the find.php pages continue to move into the main index and be satisfied with the getperson pages in the supplemental index.Steve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sjwinslow Posted January 12, 2007 Author Report Share Posted January 12, 2007 Micheal,I had the same problem with the www.site.com/site.com for my site being listed twice by Google. It took several months for it to clear up after installing the redirects. Hang in there they will finally get it correct. I also monitored the report in the cpanel that shows the last 300 accesses to my site. I found that I originally made mistakes in my rewrite commands and not all possibilities were covered. This added additional time to my recovery.Steve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rush Posted January 13, 2007 Report Share Posted January 13, 2007 As of right now I have my meta tag's showing like this:All of the info in <> is dynamic to each persons page.Title<lastname> Genealogy : <lastname>, <firstname> <middle>- born: <birth date> died: <death date>Keyword<lastname>, <firstname> <middle>,<birthdate>,family,tree,genealogyDescription<lastname>, <firstname> <middle> born on <birth date> in <birth location> died on <death date> in <death location>All that to say the meta tags from an actual page like this:<title>Comstock Genealogy : Comstock, William Desmond - born: 12 Oct 1922 died: 31 Oct 2001</title><meta name='Keywords' content='Comstock,William Desmond,12 Oct 1922,family,tree,genealogy' /><meta name='Description' content='Comstock William Desmond born on 12 Oct 1922 in Union Township, Baxter, Arkansas, USA died on 31 Oct 2001 in Eastlake, Lake, Ohio, United States of America' />Now any combination is possible, I suppose I should increase the keyword tag a bit.Personally, I think the low content with the consistent for page format in TNG trips duplicate content for a lot of pages. Having just birth / death info for many people, I believe, sets up a high percentage of pages that Google would view as duplicate.Yahoo has been indexing my site like crazy too, which has also just started recently. I'm also get more hits in from Yahoo than Google right now.Rush Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sjwinslow Posted January 13, 2007 Author Report Share Posted January 13, 2007 Rush,Have you noticed what Yahoo is doing with the Titles of your getperson pages in its index? They are doing the same thing to mine. I wonder how they are even doing it?Steve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rush Posted January 14, 2007 Report Share Posted January 14, 2007 As best I can tell, my Title tags in Yahoo look the same as they are generated out of my web site.I might be missing the difference Rush Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sjwinslow Posted January 15, 2007 Author Report Share Posted January 15, 2007 Rush,Example,When I look at yahoo here is what I see for Andrew Jackson Cordercorder, andrew jackson Andrew ... What's New. Most Wanted. Surnames. Photos. Documents. Histories. Sources. Notes ... Anniversaries. Cemeteries. Headstones. Cemetery Project. Cemetery Project ...bythedrop.com/e107_plugins/tngIL/getperson.php?personID=I162&... - 28k - Cached - More from this site Now when I look at your Meta title and description on your page, I see this: <title>Corder Genealogy : Corder, Andrew Jackson - born: 1832 died: 1880</title><meta name='Description' content='Corder Andrew Jackson born on 1832 in Warren, Virginia, USA died on 1880 in ' />Notice how the Title on Yahoo is in lower case and only the name but your Meta Title has "Corder Genealogy : ", then the name is capitalized, then the birth and death info.That is the unusual listing I was referring to.Steve Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rush Posted January 15, 2007 Report Share Posted January 15, 2007 Ahhh!When I go to Yahoo to look at stuff, I usually use the "site:" command. That's why I wasn't seeing this.Now that is a bit odd. I wonder, and just a thought, if the title listed in Yahoo is some how modified when a search is entered to give the title more relevance and catch your eye.I suppose this could be done from actual text on the page, but not really sure.That is a bit interesting.Rush Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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