Does Askaro need a sitemap?
I've had taken my eye off the ball vis-a-vis SEO for askaro site. Time to change course.
The issue at hand is that google has only indexed approx 400 questions but in Spain alone there are more than 1200 questions. Furthermore, the url of the questions in the google index are both duplicate and wrong, pretty disastrous. You'll see a bunch of URLs with _PERMALINK_ in them. This is an artifact of a hidden html node that I keep in every question page to be used as a template for new answers. Since it's hidden via CSS, I thought google would be clever enough to not index it. I was wrong.
I just added a rel=nofollow a few minutes ago, hoping that google would remove them from the index. In a few days, I might remove the template node from the html altogether and use a different strategy to construct the html for answers (via ajax)
So, back to the problem at hand. Why isn't google slurping the question pages even though askaro's home page rank is 5? I was thinking that perhpaps the issue is that each question is 3 hops away from the home page. For example:
Home -> United States -> San Francisco -> Best tiramisu around embarcadero?
So, a couple of weeks ago I decided to add a link to all the questions in the home page (right after the 3 latest questions showcased). Note that google has followed the link and indexed the page, but still hasn't followed the link to every question.
I'm hesitant to spend time buiding a sitemap for all the questions and keep it up to date. But would a sitemap solve my problem?
As an alternative to build and maintain a sitemap, I'm thinking of having a link to all questions for a country in the country page in order to increase the number of internal links pointing to a question page, and reduce the number of hops from home. I'm also considering having a clean (and separate) url structure for the all question pages. For example, for all questions (all countries)
/questions
/questiosn/2
/questions/3
...
For a specific country questions (e.g Spain), something like this
/questions/es
/questions/es/2
/questions/es/3
....
Am I on the right track with my thinking?
Update:
Got some public and private feedback telling me to get moving and code a sitemap. Will do shortly. In the mean time, just finished I was was set out to do. So, I changed the url to the all questions page (to /question from /?questions=1 who is now permanently redirected). Also created a url for all questions for a specific country. Forgive me for spelling them out here, I'm not going to hide my desire for a thorough indexation. So, let me signal it to Big G.
Update 2:
Got more feedback from friends, so ended up
1) Reduce the number of countries in the home page (for first time visitors and google bot)
2) Increased the number of top cities in the home page to 10. So, now New York and San Francisco are in, in addition to the top Spanish cities such as Madrid and Barcelona
3) Some minor speed improvements (in question detail page). More to come
4) Remove duplicate html titles
5) Added a sitemap (re-generated every day). Might do it for the other languages or "upgrade" it to a geo sitemap (georss)
