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[scott]

we have moved our www.thailand-clothing.com site to hosting.com
all the pages apart from the index.html page are on a secure server.
there is a link on the index page to the secure server, i think your spider is following this link and we have been excluded from the index as you can not index secure servers.
i also note that you do not allow robots.txt to stop the spider indexing the secure server part of our website.
so can you suggest a way round this problem!!

[markymark]

I guess what you are asking is how do I get the Inktomi spider to index these pages, right ?

The answer is you can't if they remain within the https: (secure) part of the site. I took a quick look and see that the domain name thailand-clothing.com simply redirects to a different secure site. Why not use the thailand-clothing.com domain to put your home page and a couple of informational pages about your products - this will allow the spiders to crawl your pages. As soon as a visitor starts shopping, they can then be taken to the secure domain. Problem solved.

[rmridgew]

my 2 cents.

first of all, if your site were to be indexed, you would never rank for anything. you have to optimize that page

also get rid of the meta refresh tag, why not try calling an external js that refreshes for you, spiders dont read that.

the body tag is one ive never seen b4. but it refreshes all the same not a good thing id rather use the js formerly mentioned

however, a visitor who comes to your site and is forwarded b4 they can read through it. will be annoyed. This is a prime candidate for an optimized doorway page with a link to enter. this is the way i would go, unless i had a lot of time to "un secure some pages"

i wouldnt waste my time worrying about getting indexed until you have good content,

good luck

[rmridgew]

by the way this forum is not affilliated with Inktomi, to my knowledge.

would be nice though

[scott]

hi thanks for that. im a complete newbee at all this, why are the reshresh tags a problem, this site was produced by smartware software, so it automatically produced the index.html pointing to the start page which has no meta tag information i think? all i've done is change the url's to point to the secure server. i dont know what a external js or how to write one. what does the reshresh tag look like?

sorry about being new to this but i just want my sight to work and thanks for your advice :)

scott

[ihelpyou]

Welcome to the forums Scott! :hi:

Sorry, but I cannot go into details with you right now as I am away and have a bad connection.

In short, you need to build a real site with your own real pages. Until you do, you can forget about the search engines. All you are doing is pointing your domain name to someone else's site(secure server) This is not your site.

You have nothing for the search engines to index right now.

[scott]

have you eve tried building an ecomerce site yourself with out shop building software. excuse me but your suggestion is rather silly! all the info for the search engine is on the index page.

[excell]

Not such a silly suggestion at all :). I run quite a few e-commerce shopping sites and the pages are all built in static html with the only pages going to a SSL server being the actual shopping cart when it is necessary.

If you cannot change the system you have chosen then I think you need to build some more content pages to give the Search Engine spiders something to index. There is plenty of help available to help you to do this and to optimise your site correctly so it can gain high rankings on the search engines.

[MakeMeTop]

>have you eve tried building an ecomerce site yourself with out shop building software.

Yes - do it all the time. Mainly for sites who have tried to do it themselves by automated packages and then find they can't get listed on search engines!

You have a choice - keep your site as it is and not be listed or change it to a search engine friendly site which then routes buyers to your shopping cart. The advice you were given above was anything but silly, I'm afraid.

[scott]

actually are site was ranked very high before we changed servers. all we needed to do was to switch the permissions on for the index page. the meta tags were great and simple and it ranked us on the first page of most of the inktomi. !!!!

[Blue]

Hi Scott,

In order to get the best rankings across a broad range of search engines, it would be wise to follow the advice of those posters above.

As suggested, although it may take a lot of rework, move all your pages off the secure server except the shopping cart pages. This way, all your content can be picked up by the search engines and your customers are still secure.

So, what this means is that all your product and informational pages are non-secure, thereby offering all the content to the search engines, and not until a customer clicks the add-to-cart, view-cart or checkout buttons will they be taken to the secure server.

This gives you the opportunity to optimize multiple pages for multiple keyphrases thereby increasing your ability to gain good rankings in multiple search engines.

One possible way for you to accomplish this, is if your HTML editing software allows you to make global "find and replace" commands, so you can search out specific portions of URL's (the secure site links) and replace them with the non-secure URL's so that only the shopping cart buttons have the secure links. Then you just have to re-upload the site.

If the software you're using doesn't have these capabilities, check out XReplace-32 (http://xreplace.vestris.com/) which specifically performs this function.

Hope this helps,