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Sessions and Authentication

Make sure that search engine robots can access the site content without having to log-in. For example many forums are configured to only permit authenticated users to view the site contents. Session ids are used as part of authentication or standalone to track users across the site. These are implemented either using cookies or by adding an id to the URL. Robots can't manage cookies and any session ids added to the web address present problems similar to dynamic URLs. They will almost certainly no longer be valid by the time the robot visits other pages on the site.

Extraneous Content

Any text not directly relevant to the content should be removed. This includes statistics, member signatures, profiles, repetitive text and images. These dilute the content especially for non-authenticated users. On blogs and forums link member names to their posts, this acts like a mini sitemap directing robots to deep or old content. Similarly create a page with most commented or viewed articles, these should use relevant anchor text.

Make sure that generated content uses correct Title and Header elements. The title and headers should contain the page's target keywords. Each content page can link back to the site's home with the main target keywords. This can be done through a text link or an image with relevant ALT text.

All pages should be optimized for load speed and should not be greater than 100K and probably closer to 10K in length. Some search engines will not index more than the first few paragraphs of a page and even Google says that its robots will give up on slow or very long pages

Sessions and Authentication

Extraneous Content

See Also