Tag Archives: crawling

Google indexing, bandwidth and calendar parameters

Dilemma

spiders clogging up the works
March 2012 in Australia has been very wet - the spiders don't like it any more than we do!

Summary

The events plugin does what it can to help get your events indexed (see below).  Dynamic event lists change frequently (daily or more?) as time goes by – they drop off old events and show the newer ones.  These frequent “updates” could perhaps cause more attention from a search engine.    Widgets (box and calendar) that have internal links back to the main calendar page can also make google think that page is important.  Especially if those widgets are on every page.

Maybe that is what you want, and maybe it is not!  You may need to control it.

You the webmaster can help the seach engine spiders or crawlers further to index your site while not chomping all your bandwith.

How events plugin helps indexing:

Other tools to manage indexing and bandwidth

How to get your events indexed:

How to manage bandwidth

Notes

  • Think carefully about using multple views and about the sidebar widgets that can generate a plethora of links back to the calendar page -Get other measures  in place to avoid overemphasising the calendar page importance
  • Attempting to avoid bandwith issues may affect indexing – wrt query string parameters.  Best is to ‘tell’ google what to focus on.  See webmaster guidelines
  • It seems google will be indexing the POST variables too and they advise sticking with GET (ie the query parameters)
  • Hmm – maybe adding rel=”next” and “prev” to pagination will help avoid diluting page rank? See googles video or article
  • Also we should consider sidebar widget issues – links on every page that point to the same  may overly highlight the calendar page and make it more important – sometimes this is intentional and sometimes not.  Related question via Brad Gosse: 2010/12/06/do-tag-clouds-in-sidebars-affect-seo-ranks?    Should the widgets have no follow links on certain links ? …. but we want that indexing….maybe just the rel control?