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Subject:
Listing drug information pages
Category: Health > Medicine Asked by: drugscom-ga List Price: $50.00 |
Posted:
22 Apr 2002 21:32 PDT
Expires: 29 Apr 2002 21:32 PDT Question ID: 3035 |
Hi Our website, www.drugs.com, contains free unbiased information on over 24,000 drugs and medications, which we believe is a very important resource for consumers and healthcare professionals. We are finding it near impossible to get the drug information pages spidered by, or listed with Google. As you could imagine, the only way to manage all of this information is to build the pages of the site dynamically, with the content being drawn from a database. Almost all of our URL's contain http://www.drugs.com/index.cfm? followed by a string to identify the content to be served. We have also set up a system where pages about a specific drug can be found at a third level domain e.g. http://claritin.drugs.com and also at a http://www.drugs.com/claritin/index.html Although there is almost nothing available on the web or in Google for a lot of the drug names we cover, we still do not seem to be able to get the drug information pages listed. Google prides itself in providing extremely relevant search results. Almost all internet users seeking information on a particular medicine will search on the actual medicine name, and without a listing for the drug information page, a search on Google will not provide access to the information available on the Drugs.com website. We suspect your spider is unable to reach this data, or we are doing something that disqualifies us. Can you please advise on how we can obtain listings for the actual drug information pages. Thank you. Judy O'Neill Pharmacist www.drugs.com drugs@drugs.com |
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Subject:
Re: Listing drug information pages
Answered By: athena-ga on 22 Apr 2002 22:19 PDT |
The best way to get information and help with getting listed with Google search is through the main Google site - www.google.com. The following links will provide background information for your question: ://www.google.com/webmasters/faq.html ://www.google.com/webmasters/1.html The following page will help you determine to whom you should send a request for direct assistance: ://www.google.com/contact/ Hope this helps. |
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Subject:
Re: Listing drug information pages
From: jono-ga on 23 Apr 2002 01:47 PDT |
Hi Judy, You have some specific search engine optimisation questions. Take a look at http://www.10s.co.il/craig/html/links-to-search-engine-optimisation.htm for links to search engine optimisation forums, resources & companies. Google I beleive, can spider down to 5 directory levels deep, obviously keeping it shallower helps (2 - 3). I would recommend a site map with the absoulte address to each of your dynamic pages. If this site map is linked off your home page, there is no reason why Googlebot won't be able to find these dynamic pages & link them. Rather than take chances, it may be worth getting a professional SEO in. |
Subject:
Re: Listing drug information pages
From: cindy-ga on 23 Apr 2002 10:33 PDT |
Judy, Almost every page on your site is a dynamic url. Although Google is more willing to crawl dynamic urls than other search engines, that's probably what is causing your difficulty. If you can find a way to convert dynamic urls such as http://www.drugs.com/page.cfm?s=430,443,100000349 to static urls (i.e. they should not contain a '?' character), then you would probably get better across- the-board crawl coverage by every search engine spider, not just by Google. Regards, Cindy |
Subject:
Re: Listing drug information pages
From: wanderama-ga on 28 Apr 2002 11:42 PDT |
Hello, Judy, You are very wise to spend only $50 on getting this information. A search engine optimization firm might charge you thousands of dollars for something you can easily do in-house. You are very close to being found by Google!! Yes, the problem is your dynamic URL structure. Google's spider will not be able to find any of the pages linked from your home page. The good news, though, is that you already have the static URLs created. jona-ga is right about creating a site map or something similar that links off your home page. But, I don't agree that you need to hire someone to do this. It will just take a bit of time. Here's the steps you'll need to take: Step1 -- Create a static link to "Drug Listings" (druglistings.htm or druglistings.asp) in your Categories menu on the home page Step 2 -- Creat the page (druglistings.htm or druglistings.asp), list all of your drugs A to Z (yes, all on the same page -- with alphabetical anchors at the top of the page) and link each one to the static URLs you've created (e.g. http://www.drugs.com/claritin/index.html ). Step 3 -- Wait for Google's spider to come back and index these URLs. The beauty here is your creating a link to a very valuable page: A complete listing of prescription drugs. I would expect not only will your drug pages get listed in Google's index, but the "Listings" page will eventually achieve a very high ranking in Google. Please let me know if you have any further questions. Hope this helps, Jeff Gregory Copy editor/SEO for Bankrate.com |
Subject:
Re: Listing drug information pages
From: wengland-ga on 02 May 2002 13:46 PDT |
Not sure if this is possible in Cold Fusion, but a common solution is to replace the URL paramters (?a=b&c=d) with 'fake' directories. Ex: mydrugs.com/drug.cfm?name=clairtin&dose=200 with mydrugs.com/drug/claritin/200 Where the 'drug' directory is actually the cold fusion script that will then parse the extra bits of the URL into parameters, splitting on the '/' mark. This way you'll end up with conventional looking URLs and still have the needed parameters. Will |
Subject:
Re: Listing drug information pages
From: lightuser-ga on 19 Jun 2002 15:22 PDT |
Jeff Gregory it is right. You also can create multiple doorway pages or cloack the whole site (recomanded). Cloaking (ip delivery) it is the latest search engine positioning technology. It is the ONLY real solution for dynamic content and flash sites. Search Engines loves simplicity, also Search Engines have very big problems reading dynamic content and flash sites. What is cloaking? - Cloaking software creates simple pages for each major engines tacking great care to follow each engine guideline in order to achieve the biggest ranking possible. The pages will be simple text without any dynamic content that can be a problem for search engine. When a search engine spider visits your site the cloaking soft detects the engine by the ip and serves him the right optimized page. But when a surfer visit your site your nice flash, php, Java, dynamic page will be showed. Contact me at mircea@businessresearchsources.com for more information. |
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