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John
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Joined: 30 Jun 2003
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Location: Patong Beach Phuket Thailand
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 Posted: Thu Sep 11, 2003 8:06 pm Post subject: Search Engine-friendly pages? |
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Is there a way to create pages from templates such that each unique page created from the template can:
- have its own filename
- persist until the template changes
- and is therefore able to be found and indexed by the search engine spiders?
For example: if I use a template to serve pages of all products in a catalogue - then how do I create a page for each product, so that the search engine spiders can find and index each page/product with it's own unique text and therefore index all product keywords for search engine users to be able to find my products?
Is there any way to uniquely rename the filename containing the output of a single template? I couldn't find it in the docs...
This is surely a fairly important requirement for a site that is trying to sell anything, don't you think?
Cheers
John
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muppie
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Joined: 27 Apr 2003
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| Posted: Sat Sep 13, 2003 2:52 pm Post subject: |
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If you display each product / item like this:
/showitem.php?id=xxx
then link to each item in a listing e.g.
item 1 -> link to showitem.php?id=1
item 2 -> link to showitem.php?id=2
the search engine will crawl them all
What you are asking is just a complicated way to achieve the same thing |
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John
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| Posted: Sat Sep 13, 2003 6:41 pm Post subject: |
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Hi Muppie - thanks for your interest.
Sure, I need to have index pages that contain links to the individual product pages.
| Quote: |
the search engine will crawl them all
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OK - that assumes that SE spider's are smarter (no pun intended) than they used to be then?
I noticed you used the singular ("engine") - was that intentional?
I've heard that the Google spiders now follow dynamic links but I wasn't aware that all the major players' spiders were as well...
I guess I need to get up-to-date up on my SEM knowledge of spiders  . Used to be they wouldn't follow dynamic links.
Thanks again
Cheers
John
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boots
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Joined: 16 Apr 2003
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Location: Toronto, Canada
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| Posted: Sat Sep 13, 2003 9:04 pm Post subject: |
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if you really need to alter what you called the dynamic page names, I suggest you look into apache mod_rewrite.
cheers |
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muppie
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| Posted: Sat Sep 13, 2003 9:18 pm Post subject: |
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I was referring only to google yes as that's what I use 99.9% of the time. And yes google will crawl ?id=xxx just fine.
You can use mod_rewrite to make it look like html if you wish too |
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John
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| Posted: Sat Sep 13, 2003 9:42 pm Post subject: Thanks |
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Ok - thanks for the comments guys.
And, yes - I could use mod_rewrite as I use Apache (don't we all  )
Regards
John
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scaryfast
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Joined: 20 Sep 2003
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| Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2003 5:40 pm Post subject: |
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Google wont follow links to pages which use 'session id' variables in the url parameters.
ie. http://mydomain.com/index.php?sid=425ertgd53rfgs535tge
And hence, will not list them.
Its often a good idea to test to see if the client requesting a page is a web bot/search engine spider [ such as GoogleBot ], and then generate the page without sid's appended to links.
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John
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| Posted: Sat Sep 20, 2003 10:55 pm Post subject: |
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Hi Scaryfast
Thanks for the insight.
In what circumstances might an SE robot find a URL with an SID?
| Quote: | | ... test to see if the client requesting a page is a web bot/search engine... |
How would you suggest doing this?
Perhaps incorporated into any tracking/logging/session-handling PHP routines?
And what do you suggest if the test is positive?
Perhaps serve up some linked static pages?
Cheers
John
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scaryfast
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| Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2003 12:19 pm Post subject: |
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It would have been put in intentionally by whoever coded the page, ie:
| Code: | | <form action="index.php?sid=3245teg566fged3t" method="get"></form> |
An example of the use of $sid's is the code for this forum, view the source for any of these pages, and search for 'sid'. This parameter is appended to many, if not all of the links within these pages, and would not be followed by a spider.
These session id parameters are necessary for genuine user sessions, but ought to be ommited when our site is being crawled by a search engine bot.
You can determine whether a guest on your site is a googlebot thus:
| Code: | if ( !strstr $HTTP_SERVER_VARS['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] ,'Googlebot' )
{
// dont append $sid
} |
Obviously, a nice long list of all the registered spiders you can find is best for making sure youre covered with all the search engines.
This method can be used to kick out an optimised page to a spider, however, telling fibs and generating a page entirely unlike the one seen by a real person is frowned upon by search engines, [ Known as cloaking ] and Google says:
| Quote: | | ...setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index. |
See Google Information for Webmasters for more information on the indexing of dynamic sites.
See here For an almighty discussion of this topic.
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boots
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| Posted: Sun Sep 21, 2003 8:50 pm Post subject: |
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| But you probably don't want links to sessioned pages to be indexed anyhow since by definition, a sessioned page is supposed to be owned by a unique owner and thus only have information pertinent to that owner. |
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scaryfast
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boots
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| Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2003 8:58 am Post subject: |
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| scaryfast wrote: | Look at the url for this topic [ viewtopic.php ], the script which linked to it has has appended a 'sid' parameter, even when the client is not logged in, meaning that this topic would not be indexed by a search engine.¹
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¹ Assuming no tests are made to determine whether our client is a search engine spider. |
Fascinating, because that does not happen for me  . I am logged in, obviously. Must be cookied.
I agree though that your example shows a good case where you would want indexing. My point is that the sid should probably not be included on the url string for a page like that in the first place. I understand though that sometimes it is necessary On the other hand, if it is absolutely necessary, then again, it is probably not the type of page you would want indexed. Not adding sid to the url string also means you don't have to do checks on every page hit to see if sid should be removed from the url...
I say that cautiously as I'm sure there are many things I haven't thought through on this topic
Cheers. |
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scaryfast
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| Posted: Mon Sep 22, 2003 9:11 am Post subject: |
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| boots wrote: | | My point is that the sid should probably not be included on the url string for a page like that in the first place. |
I agree  .
I think the argument for doing it is that the session should be tracked from the moment a client obtains their first page from the site, as they can still make session wide preference changes and stuff.
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