Will google index this type of dynamic link?

shownews.php?article=03945feefrf

[zorafex]

http://mydomain.com/shownews.php?article=03945feefrf

will google like this type of link? (index it?)

[Brett_Tabke]

Hard to say. I've seen it where that type of string was id'd as a session id and not indexed.

[webmasterworld.com...]

[GoogleGuy]

Possibly, but probably not, since it looks so much like a session id. Much more likely would be to index a link like
[mydomain.com...]

[Powdork]

GoogleGuy,
What is the difference that makes yours look less like a sessionid? Is it because there are fewer charaters after the?, or is it because there are only numbers?

[lasko]

Google managed to index all my 2300 pages using

www,mysite.com/page.php?tag=4574

Php is the best for being indexed and as long as you keep it to 1 and the content of the string is clean then you should have no problem.

Using /page.php?tag=hgy674try47

where the content has letters and numbers this would have come from a session and Google does not follow sessions.

Keep it short and clean :)

[dmorison]

Possibly, but probably not, since it looks so much like a session id.

:(

It is common practice amongst many websites to use unique identifiers such as those generated by PHP's uniqid [uk.php.net] function to refer to database content.

[Noximus]

Probably it will. I have seen several links in G results.

[GoogleGuy]

Powdork, anything with a lot of digits is often a session id, so more digits is definitely less likely to be sure. I've never checked into whether hex digits make a big difference either way though.

[GoogleGuy]

And I'm not saying it's impossible--we get better at indexing links all the time, but all other things being equal, a shorter parameter (and url) is better.

[markus007]

Googleguy on my site i've noticed that google index's page.asp?id=12nnn23 but it doesn't pass PR to those pages, wierd.

[Gert_Jan]

Does that page have a high PR. Then it will probably be indexed.

[sandalwood]

I would suggest you mod_rewrite but as i can see your site is hosted on a wind* server....bad luck my friend...

Expect if there is a way of rewrite urls in asp servers...i don't know...

[Gert_Jan]

yeah there are many

[slade7]

Almost all of my pages are like this... either:

domain.com/dir/mypagephp?this=182

or

domain.com/dir/mypage.php?this=182&that=view

Google says they have about 29,800 of these from my domain cached... if they decided not to index those, I doubt I would quit using PHP anyway, because I sure don't want to hack out 30,000 pages just for Google to look at without a db to help!

[zorafex]

thanks for all of the replies. Here is what all of the links look like (It is NOT a session ID, its a unique id that displays content based on the ID):

mydomain.com/news.php?article=EpZppVyyZlbkBxcoxT

However, the characters after article= are random (but always the same length). All of the links are from my main page, which is PR 6.

The links use to look like:

mydomain.com/news2.php/article/EpZppVyyZlbkBxcoxT

however, I had to change this because of some problems (I had on my end) and google indexed those url's great! However, I changed them back to this format:
mydomain.com/news.php?article=EpZppVyyZlbkBxcoxT

and made a 301 redirect within news2.php so they redirect to mydomain.com/news.php?article=EpZppVyyZlbkBxcoxT instead.

I've looked at logs and googlebot is detectin the 301 redirect. I have also tried it myself (looking at the server headers when requesting the old: mydomain.com/news2.php/article/ links and it has the redirect to the new location: mydomain.com/news.php?article= and it shows a 301)

However, google still isn't following the 301's and google has yet indexed or even "been on" a url that looks like:
mydomain.com/news.php?article=EpZppVyyZlbkBxcoxT

It has been close to a month now, since I have changed it. Any ideas?

[seofreak]

>>> page.asp?id=12nnn23

dynamic links only SHOW pr if their parent page have any, i.e., page.asp should have PR then only will it show. You can link page.asp on all your pages somewhere and next update will bring it a PR. But this does not mean your dynamic link does not have any PR .. it might be having a PR but it only shows if the parent page has any.

[kaled]

Sometimes silly/simple ideas work.

Perhaps it would be worth trying IDs of the form article=EpZppVyyZlbkBxcoxT.html

Obvious question - can Google find these pages by plain html links?

Kaled.

[GoogleGuy]

Hmm. My advice is that since the identifier is random, don't make it 18 letters. Looks like you're using uppercase and lowercase, so maybe it's base 64 encoded. 64 possibilities in 18 slots = 64 * 64 * 64 ... * 64 a total of 18 times, = 64^18 = 324518553658426726783156020576256 possible articles (check my math). I'm guessing that you don't really have that many pages--maybe it's more like a million? In that case, just use 4-6 digits or so and you'll still have plenty.

18 random letters will look an awful lot like a session ID to a search engine spider. :)

best wishes,
GG

[zorafex]

Thanks for the replies. Yes, I belive it is the long parameter that the perl script is using. This is Newspro (Coranto) news script. I found where it generates the unique id for each article. Here it is, in perl:

$newsid = $CurrentTime;
$newsid =~ tr/0123456789/pEkFuVyZlA/;
$newsid .= RandomWord(8);

What could I change to fix this? Thanks.

[zorafex]

Actually I figured out a easy way. I commented out:
$newsid =~ tr/0123456789/pEkFuVyZlA/;
$newsid .= RandomWord(8);

now, newsid equals the unix timestamp. This makes it 9 characters long. Do you think that is short enough for google to index it, and not "think" its a session id?

[zorafex]

.. just replying to myself here again :P

I posted a new news article on my site and within a couple mins, I saw googlebot grab it! Looks like that will do it!

Thanks for all of your help guys/gals.

Now that googlebot see's the articles, I will be in news.google.com :P w00t

[markus007]

SEOFreak, I have 100 PR 5's pointing to those pages, they are indexed, in the index and rank high. But they are all graybar since auguest when i put them up. I went and changed the name of one of the pages a few months ago to something.htm and presto it had PR, just have to do it to the rest of them now.