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.

[cornwall]

Think I am missing the plot, but what is a "mambo site", and why does it need promotion on Google

[searchengineworld.com...]

Doesn't tell me ;)

[john_last]

Maybe I should have been a little more specific. Mambo is a CMS from Miro in Australia, available as either a commercial or an OpenSource solution. maybe that's why the glossary doesn't tell you ;o)

[GoogleGuy]

Hmm. No love here either:
[labs.google.com...]

Although I did like the second-to-last definition.

In the absence of other info, I would recommend promoting mambo sites just the same as you would samba, tango, or waltz sites.

[GoogleGuy]

Okay, seriously this time. I would check for whether they allow crawls without session IDs. Most of the info you'll need to evaluate a content management system (CMS) should be on our webmaster pages. If it builds templates, make sure that the pages are < 100K, if possible. Let us know what you find out!

[john_last]

LOL GoogleGuy maybe a Mambo site about dancing could rank well? Hmmm off to do some marketing with the local dance schools ;=)

[john_last]

@ GoogleGuy, thanks for the good info I will check this out with the developers, wow this is almost like a realtime Google support forum ;o)

[rcjordan]

Mambo SiteServer 4.0 is a dynamic web (php) content management tool built and is capable of building sites from several pages to several thousand. Comes complete with: 10 built in modules, WYSIWYG editor, site statistics, admin interface..

[sourceforge.net...]

[john_last]

Hi Googleguy,

I have checked with the developers and they have confirmed that session ID's are required. I would really like to use this CMS as it has some really nice features. Any ideas as to how I could make one of these sites a little more search engine friendly? Does anybody know of any products that can easily build static pages from this site or should I just forget this idea and build a static site?

[albert]

Hi john_last,

(who was first, by the way?)

are you really asking how to promote your CMS, or do you ask how sites made with your CMS will do with Google?

lol

I'll flag this thread.

[john_last]

This is not MY cms but that of the Australian company Miro, therefore this isn't my cms to promote! What I should like to know is the best way to make these sites search engine friendy as at the current time it doesnt seem that they are. I have had a certain amount of success (and sometimes failure) with static sites in Google but dynamic sites are something relatively new and so I am looking for a few pointers.

[rcjordan]

A few months ago, I asked around here re seo-friendly CMS, zope in particular, and the answer (mostly from one mod with experience in several cms systems) kept coming back not there, yet. I went another route.

Based on what I did turn up at the time, a tweaked-up application of MoveableType seemed the best alternative.

[albert]

John,

maybe it's an idea to search this forum for "dynamic pages", "dynamic sites", or for example "mod_rewrite", "isapi filter" and related.

There's some information here to cover the ground. Certain SEs begin to spider dynamic sites, but it seems not to be as easy as spidering static sites. Try ro avoid those?, $ and verylongdigiturls. As far as i understood.

[john_last]

Thanks rcjordan,

I am really looking for something using php as in my ltd experience of using it for several apps (mainly hacking existing scripts) it is very easy to use/customise.
Are there any experienced php devs. here that know any workarounds to the bot/session id problem/indicator pointed out by googleguy?

[rcjordan]

AFAIK, required sessions mean spider death, so it looks like Mambo is out.

>php

I'm not pushing moveabletype, but I believe it's php.

[GoogleGuy]

Yeah, session IDs cause a real problem for every search engine spider. A search engine needs a link that won't be expired in a few weeks, and most sessions expire much faster than that.

The other thing is that with session IDs, it's too easy to crawl duplicate content with different urls. So anytime you can avoid session IDs, I would recommend it.

[martinibuster]

MoveableType is good stuff.

About 6 months ago, however, I discovered a minor bug, don't know if it's been fixed. Certain options go awol when accessing the Admin Panel through a Mac machine. I think the missing options are limited to formatting options (like Bold, italic, etc.)

[rcjordan]

>good stuff

How well does it spider, mb? Doesn't it actually produce static pages?

[john_last]

From what I can gather MoveableType is only available in a Perl flavour which puts it totally out of the frame for me. Did anybody (or has anybody) taken a look at Mambo?
Is there nothing to salvage here? The thing I liked about it was that it seemed far more focussed on corporate applications rather than community app. (like phpnuke etc etc etc.)
If anybody has any insights I would be most grateful.

[gilli]

I am aware of a CMS that is doing very good stuff url/google wise. Basically they have set it up so you can completely control the url structure.

Note: Its not free or open source & I am vaguely associated with the group who are making it (we are looking at using it on some sites), but if you are interested sticky me and I'll send you the url.

[sun818]

I've been testing Mambo CMS this weekend. I haven't noticed any sessions IDs in the URL. I think the concern with search engines is if the session ID is passed through the URL. Its a beautiful product and very easy to install. The issue is that it was not designed with search engines in mind:

1) the URLs are somewhat long
2) 99% of the pages do not have unique titles.
Most page titles is the default site name

I'm not a PHP programmer so I couldn't tell you how difficult it would be to overcome these two issues.

[gethan]

sun818: The session ID's would be stored on your browser as a cookie. To support browsers that don't accept cookies php uses a session id in the query string. This was added to support browers - not to allow search engines to crawl dynamic sites - hence the problems...

There are projects out to convert phpnuke to search engine friendly forms - also phpbb ... though I think to get it right the CMS requires designing from the ground up with this in mind.

[sun818]

Thanks gethan, I appreciate the explanation - how session IDs work is more clear to me. Another product I've been reviewing is Qixite. It runs on Linux or Windows and produces a static site on your workstation. It is based on one template and somewhat idiot proof. I learned the whole program in about 15 minutes. ;)

[john_last]

Has anybody had any good/positive experiences with any Open Source CMS systems. I have been tasked with building a large site and without using a CMS it is going to be hard to manage, esp. with input from a large number of users. The company doesn't have a huge budget hence my preference for an Open Source solution.

[werty]

Postnuke with the mod rewrite is supposed to work wonders.

Also there is supposedly a new one that is coming out (xaraya) that will have all the search engine friendly features built in.

[andreasfriedrich]

I´m just wondering why quite a few CMS use session ids? I never found a reason to use them. And why would a CMS managed site not provide unique titles, keywords, description, content, etc. Is it just carelessness on the developers´ side or what?

Andreas

[werty]

Andreas...wondering the same thing myself.

All I want is the titles of the news stories to be the page title, pull some random keywrods in the story, and use short urls.

Also I would like this to work on the reviews plug-in as well as the message board. I know it can be done, I just have no understanding of php or mysql.

Does anyone know of any CMS that does this?

[hooloovoo22]

Take a look at phpnuke, phpwebsite, or postnuke. I've liked phpnuke myself, it's really easy to install, configure, customize. i'm a rookie to php, but figured out how to make it google-friendly and unique page titles.

[Got a seal of approval from gg himself a couple months ago too]

take a look at some phpnuke forums and you'll see what they say about removing session ids, making static pages and a lot more. people have hundreds of pages indexed well...me only a few so far, but learning

good luck

[Giacomo]

Try searching HotScripts.com for free search engine friendly cms [google.com]

[sun818]

You might want the put "search engine friendly" in quotes to remove all the false positives. The only one that is open source on the search list (as of 3/18/2003) is XPcms.

I'm still considering the idea of using Mambo and using Pavuk (a web site grabber) to rename the dynamic URLs to static ones on the fly. Then use a global search/replace tool to rename the links within the HTML pages to static. Hopefully, once the process is created, the entire process can be automated. But Pavuk is not an easy tool to learn, although it looks very powerful.