Saturday, September 10, 2005

(Blogger) Does having too many URL's really confuse the search engines

I'm not a brand new food blogger, but I am very new in terms of knowledge compared to most of you. In fact a few weeks ago I took about a week and "toured" through all the blogs that are listed down the sidebar of Food Blog S'cool. Wow, what a talented group. I got a lot of good ideas, most of which I have no idea how to implement. However, even though my site is not as fancy or technologically interesting as many, I do have some good content. Now I'm working on making search engines "find" me.

A while back Andrew, (who has been a great help to me) published a post about a meta tag checker site that I found very useful. Here is the link, in case you missed that post:
http://www.widexl.com/remote/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html
I've been checking it and found some things that I changed on my template. However as I have been adding links to my sidebar now the meta tag checker is telling me that my site has too many URL's. Along with the error message, it tells me "Some search engines have problems with too many URL's on a page".

I ignored that for quite a while because it seemed like there are lots of sites with more URL's than I have. However now I am starting to notice when I check my stats that there are hardly ever any google searches any more, whereas I used to have tons of those. (Well ok, not tons, but a lot for my humble little site.) I feature recipes that are kind of geared to ordinary cooks, so I used to get a lot of hits from people who searched for something like "spagetti squash" and ended up on me. Now, sometimes when I check I don't see any search results at all. I know this could be a coincidence, but I am wondering.

I would love any input from someone who know lots and lots more about all this than I do. I know that Blogger is considered kind of a "beginner" site so maybe that is one of the limitations, that all the links show up as being on the main page. I considered setting up another blogger blog just to host the links for now (until I change to a different host, which I will do someday when I know enough.) Thanks in advance for any input anyone can give me.
This post was written by Kalyn from Kalyn's Kitchen



4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Kalyn,

I don't use Blogger and so can't offer any help. I did want to say how great I think your blog is--it looks great and I'm looking forward to trying some of your recipes. Good luck sorting out the URL thing.

Ed said...

I can't help either but now thanks to the link I know I've hardly any meta tags for most of my site plus I also have too many links. I know Google Ads says to keep them below 100. Looking forward to the answer

Kalyn Denny said...

Jennifer, thanks for the nice words about my blog. I'm learning new things every day and trying to improve it.

Ed, I also noticed that google recommended not over 100 links. I'm glad the meta tag checker was helpful.

Andrew, I am still undecided, but I am considering setting up a new blog (or page if I can figure out how to do it on blogger). I'm already posting nearly every day. It might be nice to have a new page and keep the sidebar a little shorter. I guess that's a project for a weekend when I have lots of extra time. Thanks again for all your help! You're the best.

Ed said...

Google's formula is pretty complicated and very secret.Only a few people inside the company really know the reality of how it actually works. What we do know is that Google is based on the whole academic citation thing in that the more your thesis or paper is cited the more important it is. There is a relationship, appparently between links in and out. And Google can recognise link farms (would this site count as such?) So to be discoverd and deemed important you need to link and be linked to. I'm sorry I have a headache now.