drowning in google

Permalink
I had a functional website that opened with a simple .jpeg splash image which linked to the rest of the site, but it needed upgrading so i used C5 and built a replacment website in a subdirectory. When i wanted to launch the new site i linked the original opening splash image to the subdirectory.

After 4 days of patiently waiting i have finally had google reindex my site so now my c5 website is listed in google... so far so good...

for some reason google has only indexed the following pages:

subdirectory/concrete/blocks/page_list/tools

subdirectory/concrete/libraries/3rdparty/adodb/contrib

and none of the text, images or anything from my website!!!

the site can be viewed at

http://www.amidesigns.co.uk = splash page
www.www.amidesigns.co.uk/grp_cover/... = C5 site

is this a C5 issue?

********Update********
Google has listed more of my pages but i just have a rubbish position... time for a little SEO

salesman
 
frz replied on at Permalink Reply
frz
ya know for all the talk of "update your content", google still punishes you for changing your website around. Any time you take a bunch of pages off line and put some new ones up you have to expect google to impact your results. There are ways to keep the old URLS active and try to mitigate this change, but what you're describing is not uncommon for any site that changes dramatically without a well implemented SEO plan.

Some things you can do:
1) make sure the sitemap.xml file is being generated. depending on your setup that file may not be writeable or automatically run by concrete5 yet. If you goto your dashboard and check out the maintenance section you should be able to determine its status.

2) use google webmaster tools to manage when and where google looks for this sitemap.xml file on your site. just google "webmaster tools" and follow the instructions you find there.

gluck!
thanks for choosing concrete5, I think you'll find it to be powerful and flexible at solving your challenges.
salesman replied on at Permalink Reply
salesman
i had previously used my own bespoke sitemap but have now submitted the site map as automated by C5.

the results after 3 hours.....

currently one page has now been indexed by google correctly (which had not been indexed prior) and it appears in the top 5 on google for my chosen keywords.

not knowing too much about seo, my concern and what i kept asking myself was "how well will C5 preform with search engines?"

i don't think that i have a definitive answer as yet, but it's looking good :)
AnotherAndrew replied on at Permalink Reply
AnotherAndrew
I am having the same trouble.

My site has been up for almost a week and google is still displaying pages and link descriptions from the previous site.

I have done everything that Franz has suggested, but to no avail.

My site had valid code prior to being placed into C5. Is valid code really that important to SEO?
ScottC replied on at Permalink Reply
ScottC
It will probably store the wrong urls for a while, but you could get someone to point you down the path of setting 301(guessing the #) redirects to your new site. Google seems to respect those.
kutis replied on at Permalink Reply
kutis
if you're just replacing old site to a new one, add old url page to the new one.

never actually did this, but it should helps.

or, what i've done is create a custom 404, pulls the keywords that was used in google, and list the search result, this way my user always has the usability flow even if they land on a 404 page
salesman replied on at Permalink Best Answer Reply
salesman
By day 5 google has indexed my complete site and we are now near the top for my given keywords/phrases.

What I have done
1) setup 301 redirects pointing from old page to current pages. Google has listed both in their search results (with the old page indented) even though many pages have the same content.
2) Created custom 404 page, although I’m sure this had no effect on how my site is viewed by google
3) Offered my C5 automated sitemap to google ‘webmaster tools’

At this point I noticed that my whole site had been indexed by google and was in the first page of search results (I have a pagerank score of ‘0’)

4) tweeked my meta data to reflect the content on every page
5) removed the ‘_’ from the page names to ‘-‘
6) Modified my site content to increase keyword density
7) resubmitted my site map

3 hours later google had changed the search results to reflect the correct amended URL’s and now I was in the top 5 position

8) Ordered a pizza
9) Added my company to google maps
10) Submitted to DMOZ and a few others

Currently I place somewhere between 1- 5 depending on what keywords/phrases are submitted

To answer my original question I would have to say that google has not had any problems indexing C5 even without valid code.
frz replied on at Permalink Reply
frz
i think its mostly because of step #8