Re: PHP and Search Engines

Abe Asghar wrote: > > I am working with a colleague who has spent a large amount of time working > on a large and complex web site. We are looking at using PHP to generate > many of the pages. > > We have set up the server to parse all html pages so you dont see'.php' > anywhere. Would search engines have any problems whatsoever about indexing > our site? > > Also I understand that search engines dont always follow links with question > marks in them. My colleague is unsure about making a change this big that > may result in problems with search engines which we cannot afford. > > I have asked a similar question before but my colleague is unsure before > allowing me to do this. If anyone has anything that they are sure of that > they can show me such as a link that talks about this or your own > experience - I would really appreciate it. Search engines, and a lot of web analysis packages, do ignore anything after the question mark in URLs. Instead use slashes between your arguments. I.e. something like this: http://zez.org/article.php?33 Would not be indexed, while: http://zez.org/article/articleview/33/ would. If you have a file called index.html and made the following call to it: http://zez.org/index.html/articleview/33 It would be called correctly and you could extract the articleview/33 part. Indexers would index your page. A bit more esthetically pleasing result could be obtained by renaming your index.html file to article. Then chmod it to executable and then set apache (don't know how this works on other servers) to use XBitHack (do this through the .htaccess file). Then you end up with the following url: http://zez.org/article/articleview/33/ In your pages you need to send out meta information as well about your pages (if you don't allready do this). This will let the indexers do a better job, as well as give those searching better information, and more friendly information. The only indexing/search problem you'll run into is if you use a question mark as I described above. Except for that the indexer/searchers will find your links, regardless of the suffix of your files. (Don't use .jpg or something like that, apache will send a header saying that this is images and not text/html.) Just be sure to send the correct headers and meta information (informing the searcher that you are serving text/html). eZ publish, http://publish.ez.no/, uses these methods to ensure indexing of pages served. Take a look at the source code for more info if you're still unsure. -- Paul K Egell-Johnsen Developer/PR Manager zez.org: about code http://zez.org