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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.