Articles/Promotion

7 reasons why your web pages aren´t indexed by search engines
By: Clarence Eldefors		10/15 2000

1.) Flash or other plugins.

SE´s can´t read flash. If your links are in a flash application, the search engines will not follow them. All, with some exceptions, plugin applications will give you the same problems with getting your site indexed. So when you use flash with links in it make sure that you make ordinary text links in HTML as well. Then the SE´s will follow your links as normal.

2.) Javascript embedded links

Same thing here as with Flash, search engines can´t read them. As I suggested above, make normal text links for the spiders.

3.) Your pages aren´t cross-linked

Search engines doesn´t always come to your index page. If you don´t have all of your pages linked together with all your other pages, you stand the risk of having the spiders just index one or two of your pages.

4.) Invalid HTML basic structure

A correct basic structure should be like this:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Title</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="your description">
<META name="keyowords" content="your, keywords">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
Your body
</BODY>
</HTML>

Also make sure that you close all of your tags that needs to be closed. As far as I can I think of the only commonly used tag that don´t need closure is <BR>.

Altavista and Google doesn´t seem to care of unclosed tags or invalid basic structure. But all the other major search engines do, more or less.

5.) Badly formed comment tags

You have to format all of your comments according to the HTML specifications in order for the SE´s to index the rest of your page properly. A correct comment tag should start with  making a correct tag like this: 

6.) You use a virtual domain redirection service.

When you are using a virtual domain redirection service your page is displayed in a frame, although it may not be visible. Then most search engines won´t index your search engine properly. My suggestion is to submit your real, (complex) URL to the search engines.

7.) Meta refresh tags

Meta refresh tags was once a nice feature for your pages. But as the XXX industry overused it for spamming the search engines, the search engines will not list your pages using meta refresh.