RE: [PHP] Search Engines and PHP

At 13.33 +0100 01-01-23, Sander Pilon poked the keyboard as follows:

If you want to be totally searchengine-safe, do not use variables on the url, do not rely on cookies and do not rely on POST variables

for the pages

you want to have the searchengine spider.

How the heck do you build a dynamic site without URL variables, cookies, or POST variables? Kristofer

One way would be to use the url path. Http://script.php/these/are/variables/passed/to/php You fool the searchengine, it thinks 'script.php' is a directory and its getting a file called 'php', but actually you're calling 'script.php' with '/these/are/variables/passed/to/php' as parameters.

I'm assuming that the tradeoff is the loss of having your variables pre-populated in your scripts and that you have to parse the URL for them. While it's probably easy enough to write my own, does anyone have -- ready made -- a robust and versatile function for populating variables from a URL. My impulse is to go with this: list($var1,$var2,$var3)=explode("/","$PHP_SELF"); Anyone one have a better idea? A difference to note, it strikes me, is that using this method, it is no longer arbitrary in which order the variables are stacked in the URL. <http://domain/script.php/value1/value2/value3> would be a different page from <http://domain/script.php/value3/value1/value2>, whereas using variable declarations in the URL like so <http://domain/script.php?value2=foo&value3=bar&value1=barfly> means you can put them in any order you like. Kristofer -- ______________________________________ Kristofer Widholm Web Pharmacy webpharmacy@brokenhill.net 191 Grand Street, Brooklyn NY 11211 718.599.4893 ______________________________________