Search Engine Crawlability Questions.

[garbageman]

Hello,

I have been asked to find out some information regarding how the Google crawler works, and I don't know a lot about it, so please bare with me.

We are restructuring our sites Member's Directory. Any Help with the following questions would be greatly appreciated.

1) Will the crawler be able to deal with script-based dynamic content (as opposed to static published pages)?

2) The directory's category and subcategory structure will allow users to browse through listings in a category (like one can do on Yahoo.com); can the crawlers also browse through listings in this manner?

3) While our old Members Directory is based upon 'post' scripts, the new directory's scripts will be 'get' based... can crawlers deal with 'get' scripting?

If you need any more information in order to answer these, I will do my best to find it. Thanks.....

gbgman

[jatar_k]

The whole thing really boils down to the links. I wouldn't switch from post to get, or if you do then take a look at mod_rewrite. Talked about in this thread, among others.
An Introduction to Redirecting URLs on an Apache Server [webmasterworld.com]

Query strings are trouble, the longer they are the more trouble they are. You could switch and find that the bots only went one, or maybe two, levels deep into the site and lose all of your listings.

For all of your questions the answer is "if the links are spiderable, they will follow" but query strings is far from the best way to make spiderable links.