We get asked it a lot. “How do I get more coverage for my site?” Over the past couple of weeks on the Webmaster Center blog, we have been sharing strategies for large sites to help them optimize their sites for search. The series, called “Optimizing your very large site for search,” covered four important areas we believe a large site should look at to improve its relevance and coverage:
Part 1
We started by focusing on reducing the surface area of your site by removing and canonicalizing your URLs. Reducing URLs that are redundant or unnecessary will make room for the ones that are. This post offers some practical suggestions on how to make fewer URLs a reality.
Part 2
After removing redundant URLs, we focused on the need to optimize for crawl by ensuring you are compressing your site and telling us which content is new or recently updated. This helps us focus on crawling the latest and greatest content.
Part 3
The third post is all about producing content in a way that ensures it is crawled. Despite improvements in Silverlight and Flash, it is still difficult for us to ensure all of your content makes it into the index. This post offers some suggested workarounds and advice when using these advanced technologies.
Part 4
To wrap things up, we look at content from a big site perspective and offer some suggested content management strategies for ensuring your site’s rapid growth doesn’t hinder the ability of your content to be accessible to users and, as a result, suffer in ranking.
In the end, everyone on the Live Search team has a vested interest in seeing all sites reach their optimum rank for the content they provide to users. Some might mistakenly believe that large sites have an automatic advantage with search engines based merely on their size and quantity of content. But that large size can actually be a disadvantage when webmasters don’t thoughtfully consider how their sites are used by end users. If you take the time to optimize your large sites for your users, those optimizations will have a very positive effect on your ranking with search engines.
--Jeremiah Andrick, Program Manager, Live Search Webmaster Center
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Having good content that is readable by the spiders I think is a very important step in order to get search engines to find you.
Good information. Many corporate sites have dead URLs which don't take advantage of custom 404 pages.
Listing products and services in a central location - similar to a site map - could be used whenever a page can not be found or the URL is mis-typed on the website.
Cheers,
Darren.
thanks for the above mentioned points .
"Despite improvements in Silverlight and Flash, it is still difficult for us to ensure all of your content makes it into the index" ...Jeremiah, it would have been fine if you can explain more on this. Just worried that not all content may make it to index
Live search has a major search issue
When searching for things related to php, html or anything that can be in a web file extension the the results are terrible.
Try search query looking for example code:
"php fade example"
Why can't Live search not even understand such basic searches and provide totally useless pages because.
@all thanks for the comments
@cheao domain
Sure adobe and Microsoft have been working to make each respective product crawlable, but today they really are not. There is lots of detail in the article and out on the web. Check out the article from Nikhil that I posted in Part 3.
@HAI
I found one example in position 2 in the results
http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=php+fade+example&go=&form=QBRE
Not sure this is the method you are looking for but it seems to be a good result with a code sample.
Cheers
Jeremiah Andrick
@Jeremiah
I suggest you look at the same query in google and see that they understand the query much better and produce all usefull results compared to one or two good results form Live search
Thank you for the tips. This part of redundant URLs has always been difficult to me, now it's much clearer what I have to do in these cases.
Very less explored subject and you have provided valuable information. This data will help me when building and growing my site. Thanks very much.
That helps. A well written structured approach!
It's already working for me!!!
Very useful, thanks! I believe that if website good for people it will be good for search engines.
Good helpful tips, as i am new to SEO and reading blogs seems to be a good insight into how it all works, and the catches.
