[Petnanny]

Just been updating some of my pages and wondered how long it is before those little blighters (spiders), start visiting.

Also, someone posted a thread on here a while ago, which I printed off and lost. It was highlighting the link where you can see the inward links of other companies. I cannot for the life of me remember where I put it. However, I now have an SEO folder and I am printing off all these useful links, so I do not have to keep asking again

[nass]

Best place to spy on a competitor's inbounds is yahoo site explorer - punch in your competitor's url at the top. In terms of Google visits, it depends on the strength of your site. If it's weak and has few inbounds, ie can be days, weeks. If it's strong and has inbounds on other, oft crawled pages, then it can be minutes.

Nina: 3 quick suggestions if you want to make it easier for spiders to find new pages. 1) replace the javascript menu with a CSS list-based one 2) create an xml sitemap and submit it to google 3) create a robots.txt and add the location of the sitemap in there for auto discovery. Hope this helps.

[SEO Guy]

Hi Nina

My site get spidered every hour

[Petnanny]

Originally Posted by nass

Best place to spy on a competitor's inbounds is yahoo site explorer - punch in your competitor's url at the top. In terms of Google visits, it depends on the strength of your site. If it's weak and has few inbounds, ie can be days, weeks. If it's strong and has inbounds on other, oft crawled pages, then it can be minutes.

Nina: 3 quick suggestions if you want to make it easier for spiders to find new pages. 1) replace the javascript menu with a CSS list-based one 2) create an xml sitemap and submit it to google 3) create a robots.txt and add the location of the sitemap in there for auto discovery. Hope this helps.

OMG. Whats a jarvascript menu? and xml sitemap and how on eart to I create a robts.txt thingy jig??????

[nass]

Originally Posted by Petnanny

OMG. Whats a jarvascript menu? and xml sitemap and how on eart to I create a robts.txt thingy jig??????

A javascript menu uses a scripting language called javascript to make your visitor go to a link when you click it. That whole red menu thing on the topleft of your site is a javascript menu. Javascript menus are difficult for robots to use to discover what pages there are on your site. Although you have links using other methods (ie regular hyperlinks), I don't know if you have such links everywhere and for scaleability you'd probably be better off moving to a different type menu, ie a styled list. It'd look the same but just work differently in the background, and it doesn't come with the issues that javascript menus do for robots. It's easy enough to replace - either teach yourself how, but since it sounds like it's not your bag, ask one of the developers here to do it.

An xml sitemap is, for lack of a better way to put it, a big list of files on one page, which helps search engines know what's on your site. If you google xml sitemap generator it's easy enough to find sites which will do this for you. All you have to do is make one, and upload it to the root of your site. You should then go tell google about it using either google's webmaster tools OR:

create a file called robots.txt which tells any robots that come along and visit where your xml sitemap is. Robots will generally look at your robots.txt file first before looking through a site. It's always better just to shove your sitemap location in your robots.txt because that way you'll ensure that other robots that come along which understand the sitemap location will know where it is.

[KeyMark Services]

they seem to be dropping in every hour across on mlg.

[awebapart]

Originally Posted by Petnanny

OMG. Whats a jarvascript menu?

Nina, your javascript menu was discussed on another forum quite a while ago, here is the thread. I think since that thread, you have worked around the javascript menu issue by placing links to your content elsewhere (e.g. the counties links at the bottom), but nevertheless the javascript menu issue still remains (even though you are working around it).

[OldWelshGuy]

Yep the main menu is jaascript, but the internal links are elsewhere on the page. It all needs to be tidied up though.

To answer the original question it depends Google sets its return time based on how often a site changes. (this is one of the reasons the 'new copy' myth started, the other being the old Altavista freshness boost)

To encourage google to visit, get a couple of deep links.

[Petnanny]

Originally Posted by awebapart.com

Nina, your javascript menu was discussed on another forum quite a while ago, here is the thread. I think since that thread, you have worked around the javascript menu issue by placing links to your content elsewhere (e.g. the counties links at the bottom), but nevertheless the javascript menu issue still remains (even though you are working around it).

To stop repeating myself (and I know I do, due to my non existent memory) , I have now created a folder which I am using to keep advice and tips from the forum.

There is so much invaluable advice given here, and my sieve like memory can never remember, so thank you for this thread, its now printed in in the folder.