Re: search engine listings from php pages

On Wed, 9 Aug 2000, Sue Bailey 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 read the altavista pages about this, and they > imply they have a problem with urls that contain ? , with special > reference to ASP. 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? Usually search engines don't index dynamic pages because they often change. That's the purpose of dynamic, of course, but from a search engine perspective, it isn't good. If AV indexes a page and you go and change it -- say a news page that you update 4 times a day -- subsequent searches at AV will pull up possibly irrelevant information. So, the search engines index with the hope that pages they index will still have that information 2 weeks to 12 months down the road, so people who use them for searches find relevant information and keep using them. This still hurts you, though, as you want your site indexed and most of the information has a '?' in the url. There are ways around it, though. Check out this excellent tutorial by Time Perdue: http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20000526.php3 In short, if you were getting a database record like this: http;//www.site.com/page.php?ID=100, you would do this instead: http://www.site.com/page.php/ID=100, or http://www.site.com/page.php/100 See that tutorial, it will help with the concept. The nice thing is that it doesn't require any real re-write on your pages (a little, but nothing major). Hans Anderson ~ me@hansanderson.com PO Box 426, Missoula, MT 59806 | PHP, Search Engines, SQL (800)397-9116 / (406)549-6524 | Databases, Flash Multimedia, http://www.hansanderson.com | Killer Audio Production, http://www.goofiness.com | Minty Fresh Breath.