Milonic Menu and Atomz Search

billpitt · Post by **billpitt** » Sat Sep 21, 2002 12:58 am

The Atomz search engine isn't able to find and index the site pages when I use the Milonic menu and I have to enter the URLs in the index. Is there an easier way? Thanks in advance.

Regards,

Bill

pbowers · Post by **pbowers** » Sun Sep 22, 2002 2:15 am

As far as I know, Atomz functions the same as any other crawler; it won't see Javascript-based links, so you'll likely have to manually enter all your pages. At least Atomz remembers the URLs you've entered.

Unless you have many, many pages it shouldn't take too long.

To get a list of all pages at your site, try Xenu's Link Checker. It's free.

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

Paul

billpitt · Post by **billpitt** » Sun Sep 22, 2002 4:00 am

Thanks, Paul. I have been manually entering the site pages in the Atomz index. I was hoping there was a trick that would allow the Atomz crawler to see the script-based links.

Regards,

Bill

pbowers · Post by **pbowers** » Sun Sep 22, 2002 4:14 am

It seems to me that many users of Javascipt menu systems must have the same problem (I.E., links within the site are not easily followed by search engines), I wonder how that could be addressed efficiently.

The obvious solution would be to include all internal links on the main page, but that pretty much defeats the purpose of having a deep menu like Milonic's in the first place. Especially if one's site has dozens of native pages.

As a webmaster that plans to move to SSI using the Milonic menu, I'm a bit concerned about this. There are pages out there that have work-arounds, but nothing is better than plain old HTML when it comes to the engines' ability to find and index you.

Paul

billpitt · Post by **billpitt** » Sun Sep 22, 2002 4:42 am

Hi Paul,

Atomz suggests only two solutions for script-based navigation systems:

Solution 1: Place hidden links to the other pages in the HTML that contains the JavaScript. Although visitors to your site will not see these links, the Atomz search robot will find them and crawl them. The hidden tags can look as shown below and be placed at the bottom of page just before the </body> tag.

<a href="/mydir/mypag1.html"></a>
<a href="/mydir/mypag2.html"></a>

Solution 2: List the URLs of the additional pages on your site as additional entrypoints for the Atomz search spider. These entrypoints can by set from the "URL Entrypoints" page under "Options". Just make sure the URLs you list begin with http:// as shown below:

http://www.mydomain.com/mydir/mypag1.html
http://www.mydomain.com/mydir/mypag2.html

You suggested using a link checker, specifically Xenu's Link Checker, to get a list of all pages in a site. Does Xenu's Link Checker find links in a JavaScript navigation system?

Regards,

Bill

pbowers · Post by **pbowers** » Sun Sep 22, 2002 5:20 am

That's some good info regarding Atomz, I haven't checked back there since I originally set up the account. Come to think of it (I have too many destroyed brain cells to be able to remember everything on short-term recall) I probably did do as you note above.

Google also does local site searches but does not offer as much "personalization" as Atomz. See < http://makeashorterlink.com/?D17946ED1 > and how it mimics my site's general presentation. Google currently cannot do that.

Xenu's Link Checker will verify the validity of external and internal links and it also gives the option of outputting a "site map", which you can use to create a list of your internal links. You'd have to modify the report file, of course.

Paul