RE: [PHP-DB] Search engines & database driven sites

Here is an article by Tim Perdue. Every time I lookup php stuff in google, phpbuilder shows up so he must be doing something right. http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20000526.php3 Leon -----Original Message----- From: Grant Ballard-Tremeer [mailto:grant@ecoharmony.com] Sent: Tuesday, February 27, 2001 7:25 AM To: php-db@lists.php.net Subject: [PHP-DB] Search engines & database driven sites Greetings I'm not sure my question fits into the remit of this list - so apologies in advance if it's off track... Please point me in a more suitable direction is necessary! I recently converted my sites from hardwired HTML to a PHP/MySQL combination - with dynamic 'newsy' info held in a database, tailored for each visitor. Unfortunately the 'hit rate' from search engines has gone virtually to zero as Altavista, Hotbot etc. removed me from their indexes - they don't index .php files as far as I can see, and also don't follow links on php pages (I imagine it's the same for ASP, ColdFusion etc.). In contrast Google and All The Web have no problems with the .php extension (and even index my .pdf files!). I would be grateful for any wisdom on how best to deal with this. I could of course make an HTML intro page, but that would be a pity since I'd hardly be able to an intro page that conveys all the necessary info to bring the right visitors. Any advice on how to do this well? I could alternatively change the setting of the PHP parser to parse all .html as if it's php. Unfortunately I'm sharing a server right now and my ISP is unlikely to accept this because of the reduction in performance (I may be prepared to move to a dedicated server if necessary though). Lastly I thought of writing a PHP routine that, run once a day, will make a few HTML 'mirror' pages based on the content of the database to capture the search engine visitors. I could do that, but it seems to defeat the purpose of the dynamic pages somewhat... pity. Any other ideas? How do others deal with this issue? Regards Grant ------------------- Grant Ballard-Tremeer, HEDON Household Energy Network http://www.ecoharmony.net/hedon/ eco Ltd. http://ecoharmony.com ------------------- -- PHP Database Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, e-mail: php-db-unsubscribe@lists.php.net For additional commands, e-mail: php-db-help@lists.php.net To contact the list administrators, e-mail: php-list-admin@lists.php.net