new page not indexing, others are....common reason for this?

[search engine beginner]

Hello,

I am working with the beginner version of Zoom right now. I was excited to have my first search upload actually work! I'm looking forward to working with the customize menu pages to make it fit in better with the site.

I created a new page for the website, and reloaded all of the Zoom stuff. But the Zoom is completely ignoring the new page.

I was wondering if there is a delay factor before Zoom finds the new page. Or maybe there is a common circumstance which would cause an entire page to not index in the Zoom?

[David]

See these FAQ,
Q. Why are some of my pages being skipped by the indexer?

Q. Why are links in my Javascript menus being skipped?

Q. I am indexing with spider mode but it is not finding all the pages on my web site

Also make sure you have a link to the new page for the spider to find, and turn off caching from the "spider options" configuration window.

[search engine beginner]

Hello,

Thanks for your response. The FAQ is very good. I did a keyword search on the forums but didn't think to look for a FAQ. Not sure why, I'm usually sharper and finding the help information.

from the FAQ:
"The spider indexing mode finds webpages to index by following the text links it comes across as it scans through your website"


The words that caught my attention in that statement are "text links". Specfically "text".

I've been using button links like this:

<p><button onclick="window.location='nameofthewebpage.html'"> Click
here</button> to go to the web page that is not showing up on the search engine for some reason</p>

I discovered how to use the "button" command, so I'm obviously overusing it and using it in suboptimal ways. It's too fun to pass up!

Perhaps the button-click is a type of link that Zoom cannot "see" for some reason. I'll have to try setting up some duplicate standard text links to see if that triggers the search engine into indexing the page(s) it seems to be skipping over. I would be sort of surprised the if Zoom can't see this type of page. But it's technically not an <a></a> so maybe it doesn't qualify as an official "link".

I could get rid of the button techniques without too much heartache. But linking to a page through an image is very important. If there was a link like <a href="pizza.html"><img src="pizzapicture.jpg"></a> that would be important for the Zoom to recognize that www.mainwebsite/pizza.html is a web page to index.

Thanks once again. This gives me a lot to study. It's like Zoom is a pet, and you have to give it the right kind of pet food.

[Ray]

All "onclick" attributes are actually Javascript code which requires the browser to execute. So the second FAQ linked above is relevant ("Why are links in my Javascript menus being skipped?").

Javascript code in general is not "search engine friendly", because spiders cannot execute the code exactly as it would in a browser (sometimes it requires user interaction, and is dependent from browser to browser, etc.)

So not only would those links not be found by Zoom, Google, Yahoo, etc. It would also not work for anyone using a browser with Javascript disabled. It's generally a very bad idea in terms of site accessibility.

The image link code you mentioned is a more common and acceptable way of making an image link.

If you really want to use buttons and JS, you would have to consider following most of your Javascript based code with <noscript> ... </noscript> code which contains the HTML (non-Javascript) version of the same links. This is explained in the aforementioned FAQs.

Hope this all helps.