Re: search engines ignoring .php3 pages

Some very interesting ideas here... I have never REALY tried to get top search engine rankings with any of my php sites to date, BUT we did have the same problem on a site that was totally data driven, being built entirely on the fly through Perl. Something like http://domain.com.au/cgi-bin/presentation_manager.pl?$encodeSessionKey&presentation=shop&group=sewing&subgroup=needles&template=a was a common URL, and it created two problems: - search engine indexing - placing links inside email newsletters resulted in most users getting broken pages, due to word-wrapping inside thier email clients what did we do? 1. we had index.html as a raw html front page to the site, with no dynamic content. it contained keywords, it contained other metadata, we made sure that the <TITLE> repeated some of the keywords, and made sure there was some text (inside <h1><h2><h3>and<b> tags) hidden on the page to further increase search engine ranking for that page. when the page is loaded though, it re-directs after 1 second to our cgi created site. in other words, the one static page we did have was made VERY search engine friendly, and used as a re-direct... we figuried that if we had the right keywords, people could come in through the front door. this front page still gets good search engine results. 2. we were more worried about not being able to link back to our site from within an email newsletter, so we created a set of directories and re-direct files that we could build on, that re-directed people into the shop / site via a short URL. example: http://www.domain.com.au/news/topic/ redirects the user into our site using the mammoth size URLs as shown above, using a small html file with a re- direct meta tag. with carefull management, these redirects will stay for ever, and will allow to direct customers / users into the site at many key areas (we could not do this for every page (10,000+ products, 7,000+ page), but we do intend, long-term, to have a quick way of directing people into the site at key entry points for each topic. 3. we then started lodging these re-direct URLs, with some keywords and meta tags, to the major search engines. these pages are also getting nice search engine results, and provide excellent, quick, stable entry points into our huge, dynamic site there ya go, it's a bit of work, and it requires some planning and management, but it will be a slution to your problem. Justin French Creative Director indent.com.au