Tag Archives: crawl

Q and A: How can I get my .EML (email) files crawled and indexed?

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Question

Hi Kalena,

The website I maintain is informational and features largely political news. Much material reaches me in the form of e-mails which I wish to upload and make available to visitors. Can you point me to a website search engine which will index the site’s contents, including the email (.eml) files. The Windows Search facility on my computer (Windows XP) does this quite competently but I have been unable to trace a similar web search engine with the appropriate filter which will index the eml files (some of which have attachments (mainly Word or PDF). I should be grateful for any guidance.

With thanks Ezra

Hi Ezra,

As you are probably aware (but for the sake of other readers) the .EML file extension is used for Mail Messages saved from Outlook Express. The main purpose of an EML file is to store e-mail messages (and as you have highlighted may include attachment data as well).  EML files can be used with most e-mail clients, but can not be viewed directly by web browsers.  However, since EML files are plain text and formatted much like MHT (MIME HTML) files, they can be opened directly in most popular browsers (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera), by changing the file extension from .eml to .mht.

Although search engines do crawl and index a wide variety of filetypes (see the filetypes that Google can index) as far as I am aware no search engines crawl or index EML file types.

EML files typically include the e-mail addresses of the sender and the recipient so from a privacy/security perspective I would expect that you wouldn’t want these types of files to be indexed anyway (and if I were one of your information sources I’d probably be pretty annoyed if you published my email address).

I suggest that if you wish to publish (and have indexed) information that you receive by email, that you extract the relevant content and publish it in a format that is recognised by web browsers and search crawlers (e.g. HTML, PDF, DOC, or even TXT, etc..)

Andy Henderson
WebConsulting SEO (Brisbane)

Q and A: Why isn’t my home page indexed – and how can I fix it?

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Question

Kalena…

Google appears to have indexed my Products page but not my front page or the information in my header source code. Why is this happening and how do I rectify this issue?

Thanks
Chris

Hi Chris,

Sometimes it takes us a little longer than we would like to respond to questions (sorry about that), so by the time I managed to reply, it seems that your home page (URL provided) has actually been indexed.

It appears to me that the site is relatively new, and although you would normally expect the home page to be indexed first, this is not always the case.  It appears that your product page was crawled and/or indexed first – and then (some time later) the home page appeared.  This may happen if you have more links to the internal page  nthan home – but at the moment it appears that you have just a few links to the home page,

For new sites, the types of things that you should do to help speed up the crawl/index/ranking cycle include :

  • Link Building – this is THE most important thing you can do
  • Check Crawl ability – ensure that your site can be properly crawled by search spiders (do a Google search for “Spider Simulator” for tools to help with this)
  • Add your site to webmaster tools – this won’t necessarily help with the crawl rate, but can at least show you how/when the site is crawled by Google and highlight any crawling issues
  • Create and submit a sitemap – this would normally only be of significant benefit for larger more complex sites – but for a new site can help with the crawl process

Your site is still quite young, and now seems to have at least been properly crawled and indexed, but there is plenty of scope for optimisation to improve your rankings.  I suggest that you start with the basics – look at generating additional content, optimise Page Title and description tags, implement search engine friendly URLs, and most importantly, undertake some link building.

Andy Henderson
WebConsulting (SEO Services Brisbane)