Re: search engine listings from php pages

One alternative that I use frequently is to make symbolic links to a page, giving it different names each time. Then I use the $PHP_SELF variable to get the script to figure out who he is and generate the appropriate content. This eliminates the possibility that the spider will drop your page because it has been redirected or the spider thinks it's a dynamic page because of the extension. For this reason I give all my pages .html extensions and set up 'html' as a PHP mime type. Inside the page you can also have PHP build links to all the other pages so the spider can find them all without having to submit them all individually. Make these links invisible by having them blend with the background, or put them inside some bad HTML, like a table with no closing tags. Although I have never tried it, I'm sure it would be possible to get PHP to generate the symbolic links so you don't have any manual work to do, and you only have one page to maintain. But of course if you use NT, you're out of luck. Jeff Steven Werby wrote: > > 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} > > -- > PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) > To unsubscribe, e-mail: php-general-unsubscribe@lists.php.net > For additional commands, e-mail: php-general-help@lists.php.net > To contact the list administrators, e-mail: php-list-admin@lists.php.net