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[yullah]

I'm wondering since the event detail pages generated by the script are not HTML pages, if search engines like google can pick up words from events on the calendar?

it does not appear to be the case, judging by my site stats, people are searching for words that are found elsewhere in the site to find my website...

in other words, is there a way to make data in the event descriptions more readily available to search engines other than copy all of them by hand and put them on a giant keyword page in HTML?

thanks

[DanO]

* I'm wondering ... if search engines like google can pick up words from events on the calendar?

Google can and does spider and index CGI generated pages like CalendarScript generates, other search engines might be more picky. Whether you or your host have installed any system configuration to prevent them, I don't know. Have you tried submitting the default CalendarScript URL to it?

Dan O.

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[yullah]

No i  haven't tried that. Will do - but in the meantime how can i tell  

"Whether you or your host have installed any system configuration to prevent"

search engines from crawling through my calendar?

my host service is not the most helpful with customer service, what can i specifically ask them about or look for myself to find out that the problem is?

thanks!!!

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[yullah]

my hosting provider tells me it's definately a google problem, and maybe they can't crawl .pl pages...

google hasn't responded to me at all though i've emailed them for help twice...

does anyone know from personal experience / stats tracking that they are getting hits directly to dynamically generated pages within the calendar?

thanks so much

btw- i submitted my script address to google through thier form, even though my site does come up as #1 for certain keywords maybe submitting the calendar directly would make a difference...
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[This message has been edited by yullah (edited February 10, 2003).]

[Dude]

Hi...
Not really sure if the search engines are picking up your information.  But you can test to see if, what a search engine might pick up by using a search engine test..
go here and see what you get. http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi

I used
http://www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/calandar/calendar.pl

and it returned the info that was on the current month's calander with links to the other months.
Now as far as the info that is the "description" for every event.. ya know... click on the event on the calander page, and you get a descripition, I am not sure if google will do their "deep search" to that info.

Regards...
Dude.

p.s. Matt I just registered today (ya know paid) although I am .com  I am certainly not for profit.
I'll email you later today, and I apprecitate your work and I am happy to support you, send money :-)

[yullah]

Dude,

thanks for the tip- i searched that link http://www.searchengineworld.com/cgi-bin/sim_spider.cgi  for my calendar.pl and it came up with all the text (event titles etc) and the links. i just don't get why these things don't come up in the google search...

i know all the engines work differently, i've gone crazy looking through the discussion boards etc that google has and some others-

is there anything i need to include robots.txt for? or is that just to stop engines from crawling certain areas on my site? i currently don't have a robots.txt file, so i'm wondering if that's affecting anything...

confusedly yours,
yullah

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[This message has been edited by yullah (edited March 11, 2003).]

[Dude]

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is that just to stop engines from crawling certain areas on my site?
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Yes.  It tells a bot where it is allowed to go and not allowed to go, most people use it to exclude bad bots and email harvestors.

I don't use a robots.txt file, and I'm not completely experienced about setting one up, but it not very difficult as you can read about it many places on the net and google faqs.

I don't use a robots.txt file because I monitor all my 404 errors coming in, and without a robots.txt file I get a report that includes all the bots and email harvestors that get reported with the 404 errors.

Matt may have such a script for reporting such errors, I am not sure, but it wouldn't solve your problem.
I use Guardian... http://www.xav.com/scripts/guardian/

Getting back to your original question, it may be that Google and some of the other search engines are not including discussion groups in their search, for a number or reasons... too much info out there, too easy to spam the index, not very stable.  My discussion group used to be index and crawled all the time.  It doesn't anymore.  I just did a search for some text in one of my discussions from last year and it isn't in google.
Try going to http://www.webmasterworld.com   there are lot of smart guys over there that may give you a more definitive answer.

You could make a "doorway" type page and put keywords there to have the search engines find your info.. some people have mixed feelings about a doorway page.
You could put your info in a framed page, and within the "noframes" tags place your keywords and info there.

I know stuff... but sometimes I just don't know, what I know...  :-))

[Dude]

Quick note...
when I mentioned discussion groups above.. I mean one that you would have on your/my website that would be indexed by the search engines...

[DanO]

** It tells a bot where it is allowed to go and not allowed to go **

AFAIK a robots.txt file only tells spiders where NOT to go. Some don't even bother with it and will index all pages regardless.

Dan O.

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[Dude]

For what it's worth... www.archive.org  
user agent ia_archiver just came through and spidered my message board .

So I guess that's worth about 2 cents :-)

[Dude]

and... I just happened to look at my logs and google was visiting the calendar pages... out to 2006+
How they are handling the data is another issue.

Two cents.

[yullah]

well, the good news is google is now crawling my calendar and returning my event titles...
VERY happy about that! :-)

now if only i could find a way to index the actual text in my event details pages...

maybe a big keyword page with a re-direct to my calendar page would do it...

anyone know where i can find the file that holds all the event data & if i can narrow that down to the details field at all?

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[DanO]

** well, the good news is google is now crawling my calendar and returning my event titles... now if only i could find a way to index the actual text in my event details pages **

If Google is getting to the event page, it will index all the text on it. However, each of the search engines use different ranking algorithm as to how it is matched. Many consider text enclosed in <h1> tags most important, <h2> next, etc.

Dan O.

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