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PubCon 2006 Vegas: Site Structure for Crawlability

Moving away from the world of PPC, this session was on the topic site crawlability. Tim Converse of Yahoo had a lot of interesting information to bring forth, along with Vanessa Fox of Google and Mark Jackson of Vizion.

Crawlers are always running, and they find your site by way of external links, domain registration, and site explorer feeds. For each distinct piece of content on your site, make sure it has only one URL. This will prevent any duplicate content issues. Also, in case anyone was wondering, Yahoo does pay attention to what you use as anchor text for your internal links.

Many sites ignore accessibility issues, and this is not a good thing according to Google panelist Vanessa Fox. It is important that your site is structured to be accessible when images are turned off, when java script is turned off, when flash is turned off; and it’s also important that your site can be properly scanned by a screen reader.

Mark Jackson of Vision stressed the importance of including product descriptions. He also mentioned that within the meta title, it is best to put the most relevant and important words first… not your company name! Also, though it is a definite usability issue, page load time and page size do not matter to crawlers. Yahoo nor Google will penalize you as a result of long page load time or large page size.

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