Re: PHP and search engines

At 10:29 AM 10/23/2000 +0100, Kraa de Simon wrote:

Hi, A few questions/statements about indexing/search engines. Q0: Search engines will always see the final result (generated HTML) and never sees the PHP scripts behind it. True?

yes - the search engine spyder is just like a regular browser. php is server side witch means that the server processes the phpcode then fires it off to the user.

Q1: I've heard that pages containing ? and/or & will *not* be indexed by search engines. E.g. http://www.mydomain.com/test/test.php?a=1&b=2& Is this true?

for the most part. there are a few that will crawl those pages...but for all practical purposes...true, they will not crawl those pages.

Q2: I also heard that if you changed ? and & by / the pages will be indexed! E.g. http://www.mydomain.com/test/test.php/a=1/b=2/ Will this work?

hrm....i don't know about the "=". the ? to / is correct...in part..... i used to have page.php?location=main and they were never crawled...now i use page.php/main to do that i have this code..(thanks bruce c.) ===================snip================== $requested_page = getenv("PATH_INFO"); $allowed_pages = array(

        "main",
        "search",

); foreach ($allowed_page as $this_page)

        if ($requested_page == $this_page) {
                include "$page.html";
                $madeit = true;
        }

if (!$madeit) include "default.html"; // or display an error message ===================snip================== (PHP4 syntax; you'll have to use the while(list() = each()) form instead of foreach if you're using PHP3.) its pretty simple and easy to follow.....

Q3: Anybody with some experience about generating meta tags?

um....meta tags are like a summary of what you site is about.....a site about 3 legged jeans may have metawords like " three, leg, legged, 3, thre, 3 leg,,,,,etc..etc...etc... i hear that there may be programs that will look at your pages and make meta tags for you.... Hope this helps ~kurth

Thanks again! Simon. -- 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

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