These situations can be split into several classes:

• Google could only see a single page.  Google could see the home page but the rest of the site was thought to belong to another domain.  This can happen when a redirect or forwarding of a site is set up incorrectly. 
• Google can see a lot of the site but not all of it.  Sometimes sections of a site can be invisible to the search engines if they cannot be reached through normal HTML links.  This can be a problem if you use Javascript drop down menus. 
• The search engines find content on the site that the owner didn’t know existed.    In one case a business had split in two and switched to using two domain names on the same server.  However the content became muddled and visitors to one site were seeing pages from both sites.  This confused the visitors and the site statistics.  Visitors to one of the sites were being logged to the other. 
• Sites get misused without the knowledge of the owner.  A small business found that the forum it ran for its customers had been loaded with spam messages and the site was now associated with adult sites. 

It is a good idea to check what pages Google has indexed for your site to see if there are more or less than you expect. 

This check is easy.  Go to Google and click on Advanced Search. 

Then enter your domain name (without the www) in the ‘Search within a site or domain:’ box and leave all other boxes empty.  Click on ‘Advanced Search’ and Google will display a list of all the pages from your site that are in its index. 

Don’t worry if the total is not exactly right - pages that Google considered unimportant may not be included and if you have dynamically generated pages they may appear twice with different search terms. 

However if when you look through the list there are pages you expect to find but can’t or there are pages you don’t recognise then further investigation may be warranted.  Contact us if you would like further assistance. 

It helps to explain that when indexing a web site the search engines treat every page individually.  So, a large site has the opportunity to have a page dedicated to every relevant topic and to link the pages so that they all have a number of incoming links.  The small site covering the same range of topics cannot achieve the same focus with each page nor provide the same number of incoming links. 

When the search engines evaluate a page they not only consider what it says but also how focussed it is on that topic.  A page covering three topics, one after the other, may be seen as less relevant to a search as a page covering just the topic of the search.    Adding more content to a page to try and cover more keywords may be counterproductive if it dilutes the main topic of the page. 

The solution is to be very focussed in the content of each page.  Keep each page to as narrow a topic as possible, if necessary dividing a page in two rather than trying to cover two topics on one page.  Then ensure that each page has a Title, Description and Keywords that summarise the subject of the page and do not stray from the theme of the page. 

If your business is by nature very general it can be better to focus the website on the five or six main areas in which you operate and dedicate a page to each and then consolidate all less important areas onto one page. The alternative of five or six general pages is likely to be less productive. 

The search engines see Flash content much as they see an image - with little text content that can be indexed.   

If the Flash is just used in a banner or as a way of displaying a moving image then there should be no problems.  However if the whole site is developed using Flash it will not usually get good rankings in the search engines results.  In particular:

• although search engines are beginning to be able to extract text from Flash, it is unlikely that a Flash site will be seen to be content rich.
• all the content of a Flash animation belongs to the same page so a site developed in Flash may be seen as having as little as one page. The more pages a site has the more opportunities it has to be indexed by the search engines.
• Links in Flash are not followed. If the only route to a page on the site is through a Flash based menu then pages on the site may not be found by the search engine and hence not indexed.

In summary, our advice on using Flash is:

• use Flash to display images and animations that complement the main content of the site. 
• if the Flash contains important text then repeat that text in an HTML page. 
• don’t use Flash for navigation.
• every page on the site should be an HTML page which may or may not use Flash to illustrate the content of the page. 
• avoid using one Flash animation to display several topics. 

A website is associated with a country either by its domain name or by the IP address of the server on which it is hosted. 

So if you have a .com domain and it’s hosted in France then you will not appear in a ‘pages from the UK’ search.  But if it’s a .co.uk domain then it should appear. 

For example a UK client with a .com domain selling into the UK market moved their hosting to the USA to take advantage of lower costs.  Unfortunately they found that their site disappeared from the ’search the UK’ results.   

It is not always obvious where a hosting company has its servers - a major UK hosting company has its servers in Germany.   

Of course, a lot of your potential clients will normally choose the ’search the web’ option so it won’t always matter but most small businesses would prefer not to risk losing even a small number of business opportunities.     

Therefore if your site doesn’t appear in the searches that you would expect, ask your hosting company where their servers are. 

Often these domains will all be set up to point to the same web space, using the web forwarding options of the domain registrar. 

The problem with this approach is that Google penalises duplicate content on a website.  So if you are not careful all your domains could end up being penalised.  And if you are careful and redirect all the less important domains to the main domain using a permanent redirect ( or 301 redirect) then they will subsequently be ignored by the search engines (since they have been permanently redirected they are assumed to be no longer relevant). 

Our normal recommendation is to have one domain and focus your marketing budget on promoting that domain.  If you have inherited several domains then we would advise you to redirect all of them, using a permanent redirect, to your chosen main domain and again focus your marketing budget on that site.    

Over the years we have seen the same issues arise over and over again both with websites run by our clients in the travel business and with the sites of other small businesses. 

This blog is an attempt to highlight some of the most common situations we encounter and help the smaller business compete effectively.   

Articles will be written on an ad hoc basis so please come back to catch up on our latest views and, hopefully, comments from our readers. 

We welcome your contributions to the discussions, however in order to avoid spam all comments will be moderated.