Understanding Search Engine Speed Bumps & Walls
In Part One of our “How Search Engines Work” series, we showed you how search engines go to work the nanosecond you submit a query. But search engines aren’t perfect machines, and some very basic navigation errors can hinder or entirely prevent search engines from reaching your website’s content.
As search engine spiders crawl the Web, they rely on the architecture of links to find new Web pages and revisit those that may have changed. Complex links and deeply buried site content often create “speed bumps” in the search engines’ process. And data that cannot be accessed at all by spider-friendly links qualify as “walls.”
Possible “Speed Bumps” for SE Spiders:
- URLs with 2+ dynamic parameters –take this beast for example http://www.url.com/page.php?id=4&CK=34rr&User=%Tom%. Spiders may be reluctant to crawl complex URLs like this because they often result in errors with non-human visitors.
- Pages with more than 100 unique links to other pages on the site. Spiders may not follow each one.
- Pages buried more than 3 clicks/links from the home page of a website. Unless there are many other external links pointing to them, spiders will often ignore deep pages.
- Pages requiring a “Session ID” or Cookie to enable navigation. Spiders may not be able to retain these elements the way your browser can.
- Pages that are split into “frames” can hinder crawling and cause confusion about which pages to rank in the results.