Max number of SSIs on a page?

Want for ecommerce site

[johnser]

Hi!

I'm planning on creating a site with over 2,500 products (using perl shopping software called Actinic)

I want to optimise the site for each of the 2,500 product pages along the lines of ../product_phrase.html.

This is because most of the products (& phrases) are very competitive. (ie - I don't want to check my links in Google to see 2,500 X '../product.cgi?id=1234')

Why do I want to go to so much trouble?
Many of the products can be listed as ../product_phrase_variation1.html or ../product_phrase_variation2.html etc....

Of course maintaining prices and product info would be a problem if all the pages were 100% static so I was thinking of using several SSIs on each page to pull in the latest data from a database.

EG - 1 for product pic, 1 for the product info, 1 for <title> tag, 1 for <meta> Desc. tag, 10 for <Alt> tags etc etc

How many SSIs can I include on a fairly small page (20kb) before I start to see a serious deterioration on download times?

Are there any smarter ways of doing what I propose?
Thanks in advance for your help

John

[Birdman]

>>Are there any smarter ways of doing what I propose?

Yes, you can do this very efficiently with a database. Then you can pull all the info for a particular product with one database query.

[johnser]

Thx for that Birdman. Thats the easy way ;)

Unfortunately for X-linking purposes, I'd like to have very many static pages to achieve high rankings with good Google PR - Not possible (IMHO) with a large cgi database-driven site...

[Birdman]

Ah, but it is possible if you plan it out right in the beginning. You will have to utilize mod_rewrite [httpd.apache.org] to do this but it's not difficult. Every catalog site I build uses the same concept and I end up with static urls that all get indexed.

[jatar_k]

I would test it. You can put quite a few includes in a page before it starts affecting download time. Nested includes affect download time more than single level ones.

Not possible with a large cgi database-driven site...

wrong

just because a site is db driven doesn't mean it isn't static, or doesn't appear static (query string free).

Database would be good alternative but it would have to be implemented properly.

[johnser]

I stand corrected :)
Maybe I'll just drop the SSIs & go with product.cgi?id=1234
Will have to study it some more.

Thanks for your help
John

[globay]

It is really not that hard to do! Just do some reading on it. www.searchtools.com/robots/goodurls.html
Check out these links. They helped me a lot!

--
globay

[edited by: jatar_k at 8:34 pm (utc) on April 6, 2003]
[edit reason] delinked [/edit]

[jatar_k]

product.cgi?id=1234

actually, none of us are recommending that. Both birdman and globay have provided links to stay away from query strings using mod_rewrite. Your url's could look like that logically but mod_rewrite would change the way they look in the location bar to a static form.

[johnser]

Sorry Jatar

I meant I'm probably going with .cgi? & then using the rewrite tool as suggested instead of SSI.

Thanks for the clarification & help!
Much appreciated :)
John