Mambo Content Management System and Google

Any experience?

[john_last]

Does anybody have any experience with promotion of mambo sites on Google? I would welcome any feedback or any issues realating to such.

[Giacomo]

sun818, there's also FlexPHPSite [china-on-site.com], a free search engine-friendly CMS. Made in China. :)

About grabbing dynamic pages and doing a global URL search & replace... That sounds terribly expensive (in terms of system resources) to me.

<added:>Besides, you will have to do some URL rewriting at some point anyway, so why not just hack the application?</added>

[sun818]

Hi giacomo, in terms of search/replace, this would be physically changing the strings within the downloaded files. And I know of one free program, BK ReplacEm that will perform multiple search/replaces in one pass. So, it would just be a matter of plugging in my values and its done. The part that worries me is Pavuk with trying to rename dynamic URLs and remove all the &? = in the file name. I suppose I'm willing to go through all this effort because Mambo is aesthetically pleasing.

[sun818]

An update... I looked at plone [plone.org] today which is based off zope. Both installed on my Windows machine without a glitch. I found the plone interface and documentation much easier to understand than zope [webmasterworld.com]. After taking a look at some production sites created with plone, I'm very inspired to dive in and explore plone more. I'm hopeful I can easily crawl the site locally using wget or pavuk and public a static site remotely. The beautiful qualities about plone are:

1) open-source (freeware)
2) search engine friendly URLs (without the use of mod_rewrite)
3) unique titles are possible. see the plone site in the Google index [google.com]

The "dynamic" parts of the site, like Contact Us, seem to utilize a language called Python (py?). I don't know anything about Python, so my plan is to replace that page with another page that posts to a PHP Contact Us script instead. I think that'll work. :)

[Giacomo]

The "dynamic" parts of the site, like Contact Us, seem to utilize a language called Python (py?).

sun818, Zope is a web application server written "primarily in Python, with some optimisations in C". Plone is not based upon Zope, it actually runs on top of it.

Plone looks cool but I think the production server requirements [plone.org] are a bit high: forget about installing it in a shared hosting environment.

Why don't you try TYPO3 [typo3.com] instead, an extremely powerful open-source CMS with search engine-friendly URLs and lots of other very cool features [typo3.com]? Completely free and easy to install: all PHP + MySQL. ;)

[hitchhiker]

Is there a place somewhere on this forum, where the most pertinent data directly related to spidering dynamic pages is stored?

[Giacomo]

hitchiker, the spidering of dynamic pages (both by Google and by other SE's) has been covered in several threads: please do a site search [searchengineworld.com].

[brotherhood of LAN]

Anyone ever tried making one themselves?

I have a bare-bones one for a site, caters for a dictionary/article/directory format. There are 3 "physical" files and some mod_rewrite to create the new pages, alongside with an admin bit.

Managed to get my site stored in under a megabyte, although there's over 100 "pages" and gets 5K visits a day </gloat> efficient CMS at least :)

All files end in .htm and articles can be made online by going to the admin bit and punching in a new page.

putting in titles, meta descriptions, headings n whatnot is mandatory! ;) Would not call it mambo, but if I had a few more 1000 pages I'm sure apache/php/mysql could do the duties. Hopefully.

Also have the "if-modified-since" to be altered to please thy bot.

/added
Andreas, I think they ignore session id's and the likes because theyre programmers and havent heard of "SEO" or the sort of thing we see alot of here. Just a hunch.

[sun818]

Giacomo, do you happen to know how sessions IDs are handled in Typo3? It looks like it meets all the basic requirements I'm looking for. But as I browsed the Google index, I noticed duplicated pages and look like session IDs (starting with +M57e27c35eee.0)?

[Giacomo]

sun818, I'm not sure whether that string is actually a session ID or what. There seem to be a number of duplicate pages in Google's index though. You may want to investigate further.

[sun818]

I played with Typo3 a little bit last night. I didn't find it as intuitive as Plone. The benefit I found with Plone is that I can customize what my URL names will be. In Typo3, the file names seem to random numbers. At best, customized URLs help with SEO. And at worst, it will help web surfers understand the theme of your site just from the directory names. Like I said, I would clone a local Plone copy and publish to my web site. None of the dynamic aspects of Plone would be utilized, but that's not what I'm after anyway.

[Giacomo]

sun818, glad to know Plone suits yor needs.

I agree w/brotherhood_of_lan: Depending on what your requirements (and coding skills) are, the best solution is, most of the time, to build your own CMS. Applications like TYPO3 or Plone are great but somewhat oversized for most practical needs. More so if the CMS has to be plugged into an existing web site.

On a side note, I'm truly convinced that search engine-friendly (or better, spider-friendly) CMS (and bulletin board software, and e-commerce software, and so on) are the "next big thing" in web development... for the simple reason that most web developers seem not to have fully realized yet the impact of SE's (and primarily Google) on users' requirements.

<added> Just found a nice on-topic thread: CMS and SEO [webmasterworld.com] </added>