Penalized by Google?

[dakz]

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[Imago]

The only (unjustified) reason for being penalized by Google is 404. Expired auctions however are still visible in my version.

The other possible reason is gmail having black-labeled your domain as sending spam.

[dakz]

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[Sunbum]

Thanks for the "Update"! :)

Sure hope that did the trick.

Mike

[Peter]

I had 2000+ pages indexed with members.php

And that would/should be acceptable if every user has a different username, different feedback ratings, different profile answers based on questions you've created etc.

Something tells me there is more to this than "2000 pages causing duplicate content issues"...

Which brings me to the question : If we have 2000 users who can potentially be indexed by Google like every other site with a user profile (Elance, Ebay, Guru, oDesk) then why would the ILance customer be penalized? I feel it's something to do with the meta tags and the keywords on each member page.... if they are the same (which I believe they are) then I think this is the main problem.

One suggestion I'm going to address based on this issue is whenever a member.php page is served and you're looking at a profile of a user, instead of using the standard meta tags we'll populate the <meta description="XX" with the user's opening "profile statement" and use the <meta keywords="xx"> by breaking up various elements from this template and pushing them in that keywords="xx" tag in your header.

This SHOULD prevent the duplicate content as far as I'm aware. If you have other suggestions now would be the time to speak.

Regards,
Peter

[Peter]

Another idea: IF the user has selected Skills for his profile, we can push each Main Skill he selected in the keywords meta tag :)

ie:

<meta keywords="PHP, MySQL, Copywriting, Legal, Web Design, etc">

?

[dakz]

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[andrewdrake]

Hi Guys,

I'm preparing for site launch soon and am now at the SEO stage. I'm a little disappointed in the SEO ability of ilance so far.

I highly recommend you guys use google webmaster tools (if you are not already)
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard

Go to the Diagnotics > Content Analysis section.

It is VERY important that EVERY page on a site have a unique URL, Title tag and meta description.

You can easily solve this by using the members name in the description tag.

I'm going to have to do a lot of custom work to get ilance SEO friendly, which I really didn't want to do because I will then have to do the custom work again when I upgrade to 3.1.8

Another thing I noticed is that the users profile description does not actually appear on the member's profile poge. SEO!!

[andrewdrake]

I may be missing something here but seems like a lot of hard coded seo.

eg. my home page title is "mydomain - Main Menu". That is a terrible meta title, but I can't find how to change it without hard coding in the main.php file.

I'm ok with hard coding stuff, however when upgrades occur it has to be done all over again :(

[Peter]

Thanks for your input andrew. That is one limitation .. $page_title and $area_title are defined within various conditions in the code.. to make this better we would need to search and find all $page_title = .. and $area_title = .. and then figure out a way where you "the admin" can define those seo titles (along with $area_title which defines what area the user is viewing within the Connections area of the AdminCP.

I'm all for suggestions. If you have an idea please feel free to advise a better way.

Regards,
Peter

[andrewdrake]

A solution could be a SEO section in the admin where you can define a page title and description for every page in ilance.

Variables can be added to help keep title unique on dynamic pages.

example

Home

Title = {sitename} - Freelancers Marketplace
Description = My site description
Keywords = freelancers, programming, design

Member Page

Title = {membername} ({country}) - {Skills} - {sitename}
Description = {member_profile_short_desc}
Keywords = {member_keywords}

For the above a member would need to be able to add their own search terms.


Using something like this you would have complete control and barely every have duplicate title and desc tags.

[kalgary1]

The fix is as follows:

members.php
search.php
vendors.php
login.php

Have to return the following in the header: <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow" />

otherwise duplicate content is indexed.

This happens because SE try to follow everything, and in order to browse the marketplace you need to be registered.
When the robot tries to lookup some content its redirected to the login page, which creates a loop.


Would something like this work for each page?

if (isset($ilance->GPC['???']) AND $ilance->GPC['???'] == '???')
{
echo '
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<head>
<title>Search</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=' . $ilconfig['template_charset'] . '" />
<meta name="revisit-after" content="0">
<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">
</head>';
exit();
}