Re: search engine listings from php pages

Sue Bailey <sue@bartandsue.co.uk> wrote: > Forgive me if I have this wrong, but I think a couple of weeks ago, > Rasmus recommended making a special page for search engines to > spider with every possible result from a db query, then to send the > search engine spider off to pick up all the links, and hey presto your > entire stock is listed! I've used this method for my own internal search engines. Works like a charm. Especially since web pages that aren't linked from a URL sent to a search engine will never be spidered and indexed by the search engine since it won't be able to find them. > I've read the altavista pages about this, and > they imply they have a problem with urls that contain ? , with special > reference to ASP. A lot of search engines ignore URLs that *appear* dynamically generated, like most URLs containing a ? following by a string. I've worked around this obstacle on a few sites by using the PHP variable $REQUEST_URI and the explode() function to build an array based on directories within a site's URLs and then use the array values to feed to a MySQL query which generates the page dynamically. Using Apache AliasMatch commands in my Apache config. file (probably works on .htaccess level, too) I can then route an infinite number of similar web pages with different static-looking URLs to a single PHP script that generates all of the pages dynamically and makes all search engines happy. > I don't want to spam the index, I just want to get > my dynamically generated pages listed! Is a/v telling the truth, or was > Rasmus right? Altavista chooses not to index pages with a ? in them so do what I do as a workaround. Plus your URLs will look much cleaner. Hope that helps. Steven Werby {steven-lists@befriend.com}