A friend of mine, Matt has a couple of AIS sites running, neither of which are doing too much for him, and one of them is barely indexed by Google. So by the powers invested by me I've created him a couple of sitemaps, tweaked the sitemap page and will see if that affects his sites in the way it affected mine.
The first, and trickier site, is Growing Bonsai Trees. This is suffering the same problem that I had. Only a few pages indexed and Google ignoring the rest. The Learn Tai Chi site is a little busier but I'm hoping that the sitemap will boost the site.
I've read elsewhere that Google starts to see a typical footprint of these web sites. Because they all use a similar template, directory structure and linking structure I reckon that googlebot isn't interested looking around it. However with a bit of work these sites are worthy sites. I know I've had a lot of bookmarks on my Swish World site made, so some people obviously like it!
Anyhow, I like a bit of a challenge and I'll be intrigued to see if my changes make a difference again.
I'm not sure where you read that about those templates, as they were created by me and are in use on a very limited number of sites.
Hehe, thanks mate
Gary, apologies, I meant "these sites" as a whole. I know the templates of Matt's sites are specifically designed by yourself – so no offence intended. The directory linking method of just using the directory names and not the file names within them, the directory structure of every section having a directory etc etc. These are traits in Matt's sites. Whilst there's nothing to be done regarding the directory structure without a complete overhaul, the lack of index.html files in links I believe causes googlebot to stop at times.
Not all times however, as I also know of a fair few successful sites without any indexing issues. As already mentioned/discussed, the sites as initially output aren't as great as they could be, as I do believe that they could be really useful resource sites, pulling in far more than $1 per day.
The issues that some others are reporting is something that I am not experiencing. It's quite strange that some people get success (PaulP, Baldy), others find it difficult (Boo, Matt).
Don't get to hung up on the $1 thing .. that's pretty much an arbitrary figure that some people (giving this AIS thing a go ) are aiming for! I'm trying my hardest to get these to broaden their horizons by looking at better sites and offering better services by doing work on sites (much like you have with SWorld).
Anyway. No offence taken; you should see some of the sites that are built with this particular piece of software – they are truly awful. If you want some links email me..
It'll be very interesting to see what impact a sitemap has on these two sites. I always include a sitemap with any type of site I build – you have to give the spiders what they want!
Google seems to be playing up recently. A lot of cache's of web sites are just not getting updated. I looked at one person's site and it had been over a month, and this was a run of the mill web designer's site.
Until I added the sitemap, google wouldn't update the cache on my site (where I'd mistyped the title variable in PHP!), yet within about 24 hours after putting the sitemap up and linking to it, googlebot was happy to spider and cache every page!
Unfortunately my ideas are not fully justified because it seems like some sites, like Paul's, are being indexed with no effort having to be put in. Okay Paul's changed his since I gave him various pointers, and I'm hoping Matt's luck will change too in a few days.
But hey I like a challenge! I don't really know what I do, but sites I work on tend to improve! My own is a slow job but hey, as the site constantly changes the spiders should stay happy.
PS. Baldy – congrats on hitting your target