A year ago I have decided to switch one of my pro bono sites from simple HTML to a Content Management System. The first and almost single choice was Mambo CMS.

Now the site has almost 150 pages and almost all are doubled by PDF versions (Mambo option).

What was interesting was the behaviour with search engines. Googlebot, Slurp and MSN come almost on a daily basis but the results show up the following numbers:
Google: 118 pages
Yahoo: 4 pages
MSN: 7 pages

From the early beginings, Google has gradually increased the number of pages giving a greater relevance to the PDF versions. BUT. On Yahoo and MSN those pages have been from the beginings and stayed like that.

The ideea is that the site had the URLs nonSEF and I think this was the reason for the low numbers. Today I have activated the SEF URLs and I’ll monitor if anything will change.

The site has very good incoming links and a lot of relevant content so this could be the only factor that prevents deep indexing.

To be continued…