Gridview, paging and googlebot (and other spiders)

[ewolfman]

Hi,

Recently we've hired professional SEO services to help up promote our
website. They claim that pages which contain ASP.NET's Gridview with
paging will not be scanned by the different spiders beyond the first
page, as the url of the page doesn't change (and should be something
like http://myapp/default.aspx?page=1 and so forth).

This sounds weird to me, because AFAIK spiders scan anchor tags like
the paging tags, and should be able to scan pages beyond the first
page.

If this is true, I can't think of a way to change the url for the
paging mechanism to work. If no such method exist, this means that
"millions" of asp.net pages around the world don't get scanned....

Please advice on this. Thanks.

[Alexey Smirnov]

On Aug 8, 10:48 am, ewolfman <[e-mail]:

Hi,

Recently we've hired professional SEO services to help up promote our
website. They claim that pages which contain ASP.NET's Gridview with
paging will not be scanned by the different spiders beyond the first
page, as the url of the page doesn't change (and should be something
likehttp://myapp/default.aspx?page=1and so forth).

This sounds weird to me, because AFAIK spiders scan anchor tags like
the paging tags, and should be able to scan pages beyond the first
page.

If this is true, I can't think of a way to change the url for the
paging mechanism to work. If no such method exist, this means that
"millions" of asp.net pages around the world don't get scanned....

Please advice on this. Thanks.

To go to the next page a Gridview control fires postback and post back
to the same page (so, url of the page doesn't changed) and this is
what spider doesn't do. To make your content crawled, you can create a
custom paging without postback and using QueryString (e.g.
default.aspx?page=1)

[ewolfman]

Thanks for your reply.

Actually, your described method is a solution I have thought about.
What I meant was that I can't think of a way to do it without
implementing custom paging.

[Alexey Smirnov]

On Aug 8, 11:50 am, ewolfman <[e-mail]:

Thanks for your reply.

Actually, your described method is a solution I have thought about.
What I meant was that I can't think of a way to do it without
implementing custom paging.

Well, there are few tricks you can try, but please remember, that the
spider is trying to determine what the "real" content of the page is
and some of such tricks could be recognized as a spam. So, if your
gridview has not that much rows you can create a hidden layer and put
all your rows there (it will be not visible for users, but visible for
spiders), you can create a "print" page where you can output all rows,
you can check an agent (browser name) and programmatically change the
PageSize property, for example:

if (Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_USER_AGENT"] == "Googlebot") {
GridView1.PageSize = 1000;
} else {
GridView1.PageSize = 10;
}

and something like this

I think I personally would go for the approach with custom paging

[=?Utf-8?B?QnJhdWxpbyBEaWV6?=]

MMmm... have you tried to create a sitemap and submit it to google?

www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

No worries about paging and ohter stuff...
For custom paging using links, I think this article is quite useful:

http://www.codeproject.com/useritems/CustomPaging.asp

You can think as well using a repeater and implement custom paging as well.

Another hack could be to have another page with all the results without
paging, and include it in your sitemaps (not very pretty but maybe it would
work).

HTH
Braulio

/// ------------------------------
/// Braulio Diez
///
/// http://www.tipsdotnet.com
/// ------------------------------


"ewolfman" wrote:

Thanks for your reply.

Actually, your described method is a solution I have thought about.
What I meant was that I can't think of a way to do it without
implementing custom paging.

[Alexey Smirnov]

On Aug 8, 4:36 pm, Braulio Diez <[e-mail]:

MMmm... have you tried to create a sitemap and submit it to google?

www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

It doesn't help with the postback paging...

[=?Utf-8?B?QnJhdWxpbyBEaWV6?=]

Well,

Sitemaps does not resolve the postback paging, but let's you tell to
google which are the pages that he has to index (it seems that's the goal of
covenerting postbacks to href links in this case).

I agree with you that the technical solution is custom paging (I have sent
a link about that as well), or using a repeater controlling everything.

But I think doing a sitemap for that goal (storing in google cache every
page), is a good idea, you can add more info to that sitemap, things like
telling...this page is being refreshed daily, weekly or...

/// ------------------------------
/// Braulio Diez
///
/// http://www.tipsdotnet.com
/// ------------------------------


"Alexey Smirnov" wrote:

On Aug 8, 4:36 pm, Braulio Diez <[e-mail]:

MMmm... have you tried to create a sitemap and submit it to google?

www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/

It doesn't help with the postback paging...