Search Engine Spiders
Submitted by smile66603 on Thu, 05/10/2007 - 03:09.
I've got a couple of SEO question that apply to all search engines, not just Yahoo.
When a search engine spiders your website, can the spider go to all of your pages, even if they're not linked to from the home page?
I have a page that has links to about 20 articles, but I don't link to it from my home page, because I don't want my readers to start reading articles and forget about the call to action, even though I have included the call to action at the top of every article page. I do link to these articles from my blog though. If a search engine came to my website and saw the home page, would it also be able to find my articles page, or will it only see that page if it comes from my blog? Is this where an XML sitemap file helps?
My other question is about my blog. I have a blog through Blogger.com and I'm using the option that allows me to host my blog on my own server with my website. On my blog, I have summaries of my articles with links to the full articles. Since the blog is hosted as part of the site on the same server, these don't count as inbound links. Would I be better off hosting the blog at Blogger.com so they would count as inbound links, or is the time I would spend not worth the benefit?
Thanks,
James
Search Engine Spiders
Search engines can find any page on your site that isn't orphaned. In other words if some page on the WWW links to the page, Google will find it. However, if it's an orphan with no inbound links, it's invisible to Google, unless you tell them about it using their Webmaster Toolbox or XML sitemaps.
See above ;)
I don't seen much of a benefit to hosting the summaries on blogger and the full articles on your main site. The main reason behind this is that links from the domain blogger.com, don't really have a lot of link juice. Plus Google knows you own the blogger.com blog, so they would probably factor that in to their link equation.
Best,
Jeremy