IRM URLs and search engines

[MTDesigns]

Is there any way to stop a search engine from indexing a website with the homepage's actual directory?[nbsp][nbsp]For ie, a couple of SEs are listing one of my IRM sites as:[nbsp][nbsp]1) http://www.maindomain.com/IRMdirectory/filename.html instead of 2) http://www.IRMdomainname.com

It's really annoying, since once a visitor reaches the 1st IRM URL, the links don't work.

Any suggestions?

Also, I forgot how to tell search engines how not to index a certain page...

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Joi
http://www.myparentime.com
http://www.stopsexoffenders.com
http://www.writersarea.com (new work-in-progress)

[This message has been edited by MTDesigns (edited 04-24-00@11:27 pm)]

[Justin]

Two things - first, a search engine can only index a directory that it finds links into. It won't find that subdirectory on its own - you (or someone) has to have linked directly to that subdirectory, or submitted the URL like that into the search engine(s).

Second, it's always best to use a full URL for links and images rather than relative. The above is one reason, and there are several others...

Hope this helps.

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Justin Nelson
FutureQuest (http://www.FutureQuest.net/index.php) Support

[MTDesigns]

Thanx Justin :).

I guess the only way it indexed that page is from the links within my IRM sites.[nbsp][nbsp]So you're saying that instead of linking with just the subdirectory name I should use the full http:[nbsp][nbsp]instead?[nbsp][nbsp]I had no idea that not doing this would cause the search engines to index the subdirectories with the main URL :(.[nbsp][nbsp]Major work to correct this..anyway, thanx much...will at least be able to avoid this problem in the new site :).

Joi~

[Justin]

The relative URLs wouln't cause a search engine to find the subdirectory - you would have to have at one time linked to that subdirectory.

Think of it this way - a search engine spider cannot see anything that a browser can't see. If you never tell me that irm.com is an IRM, I would never know how to reach the site from maindomain.com/irm/. It's the same with a search engine...

Full URLs should be used anyway, for several reasons. The main one is that if I visit www.YourSite.com (http://www.YourSite.com), and you link your images with </font><font face="Courier" size="3"><img src=&quot;file.gif&quot;></font><font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">, my browser cache's the image as www.YourSite.com/file.gif (http://www.YourSite.com/file.gif). Tomorrow, I visit your site without using the 'www'. The image is now seen as having a different URL, and is not pulled from cache but rather downloaded again.

The only real downside is if you develope locally, you will have to change your links/image references before uploading. I generally work on the server via Telnet, but sometimes I do have to simply paste in the full URL for each image and link.

Hope this rambling helps - it's past my bed time... :)

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Justin Nelson
FutureQuest (http://www.FutureQuest.net/index.php) Support

[Carol-H]

When you're talking about using full internal references for an IRM page, which version would you use?[nbsp][nbsp]Would both work the same?

<img src=&quot;http://www.main-domain.com/irm-domain/picture.gif&quot;>

or

<img src=&quot;http://www.irm-domain.com/picture.gif&quot;>

- Carol Hanson
[nbsp][nbsp]www.dragonbear.com (http://www.dragonbear.com)
[nbsp][nbsp]with no IRMs quite yet
<edited to make the HTML make sense>
[This message has been edited by Carol-H (edited 04-26-00@10:51 am)]

[Justin]

Use the IRM URL - this is possibly how the search engines found the &quot;back door&quot; path into the IRM space - if you used the maindomain.com/irm/file.gif, search engines will look in maindomain.com/irm/ and see if they can find a page there... Had you used irmdomain.com/file.gif, the engine would have no way of ever finding the direct path to the IRM web space...

Hope that made sense - if not I'll try to reword it again hehe :)

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Justin Nelson
FutureQuest (http://www.FutureQuest.net/index.php) Support

[MTDesigns]

Use the IRM URL - this is possibly how the search engines found the &quot;back door&quot; path into the IRM space - if you used the maindomain.com/irm/file.gif, search engines will look in domain.com/irm/ and see if they can find a page there... Had you used irmdomain.com/file.gif, the engine would have no way of ever finding the direct path to the IRM web space
Hmmm...I use maindomain.com/images/file.gif for all of the images on 2 IRMs...this newest IRM though, I am using maindomain.com/images/subdirectory/file.gif...