Spoofing the QUERY_STRING variable

[Janet]

I have noticed that Google is not assigning Page Rank to pages with? in the url and have had trouble with a ASP shopping cart solution getting it to rank well. BTW I am quite competent with SEO principles and have applied these within the shop cart system, so I don't believe the pages are poorly optimised.

I would like to use a technique where a "static" page issues a server.transfer to the dynamic page (with all the products listed for that category) and pulls all the content into the static page.

I have the server.transfer bit working fine, the problem is in passing the querystring information so the page displays correctly.

Here is what I want to achieve:

say that foo.asp wants to transfer to shopfoo.asp?prod=23&catid=glass

I would code the following in foo.asp

servervariables("QUERY_STRING") = "prod=23&catid=glass"
server.transfer("shopfoo.asp")

Now I realise this doesn't work but I put it here to illustrate what I am trying to achieve. I basically want the tranfered dynamic page to run exactly as it would if referenced directly as a url.

Is there any way to "set" the Querystring variables programatically?

Or has any other clever lateral thinking person got another way of tackling this problem?

TIA

Janet

BTW I have looked at ASAPI rewrite but as the site runs on a shared virtual server not under my control, it will be difficult to implement.

[macrost]

Can you implement your own custom 404 page?

[Janet]

I don't have access to any IIS server configuration as it is a virtual hosting environment managed by the hosting company. I don't know of any other way of handling a 404. Are there other options?

[JuniorHarris]

Server.Transfer does not allow for the passing of parameters of any kind. The values could be passed through session variables, however this would not work for search engines or users that have [session] cookies disabled.

Would it possible to include the transfer page (shopfoo.asp) into the static pages as a subroutine or function, then it would only have to pass parameters to the subroutine. Using an include statement in the static pages, would still keep a single source as well.

[digitalv]

I have noticed that Google is not assigning Page Rank to pages with? in the url and have had trouble with a ASP shopping cart solution getting it to rank well.

I think you're troubleshooting the wrong problem here and making extra work for yourself. Google has no such restriction - I have several pages on my site that contain a? followed by querystring data, and many of them have a PageRank of 7 or more. It's not always the same as the same URL without the querystring either, so Google *is* in fact assigning PageRank to pages with querystring data.

I also have a shopping cart which I wrote myself in ASP. Searches on Google for part numbers and other products by name will return the specific product page within the top 3 results most of the time. I have done *ZERO* search engine optimization with this site - my rank is based soley on relevance of the pages. I can give you specific URLs via Sticky if you would like.

[RossWal]

digitaltv,
Your experience is encouraging. What about other SE's? In your assesment, are they too agnostic concerning querystrings?

Thanks,
Ross

[Janet]

Thanks for your insight DigitalV. A PR 7 is a powerful page rank.

I still cannot understand though, why my shopping catalogue pages are consistently showing as "not ranked". The site is 3 months old, with all non query string pages showing at least a PR3. Home page is PR5, all foo.asp pages linking from home page are PR4 while all shopfoo.asp?catid=99 pages linking from home page are "not ranked".

Please understand, not ranked does not mean "not indexed". The pages are definitely indexed and yes, if I do a search for the product name and stock number, it is returned.

The issue is they are not ranking as well as I believe they could (I have done a lot of successful SEO)and I am drawing the conclusion that Google not passing page rank to these pages is having a negative effect on rankings.

Perhaps though it is not the? that is the problem. Perhaps it is something being sent in the headers from the server to the spider.

If anyone wants to take a look at the site, please stickymail me and I will send the url.

[digitalv]

How are you linking to the products in the cart? One thing I did with the cart I wrote was create static pages containing the categories, so each link to a product was to viewProduct.asp?id=whatever, but the link came from a static document such as "cisco.asp" or "cisco_2500.asp"

Again I didn't do this to make it "optimized" for Google, it just turned out that way. I wrote a function that will show all of the products in a category so I can call the function like:

<table>
<%Call ShowCategory(catID)%>
</table>

This might have something to do with it. I should also point out that I have almost zero inbound links from other sites, so I speculate that my high position comes from the relevance of the Page title, URL, and content.

[Janet]

OK I think we have some confusion with the term Page Rank. If you have the Google toolbar it has a small green bar that measures Page Rank which has nothing to do with how you "rank" when someone keys in your search terms into Google, but is a rough estimate of your "link popularity". A Page Rank of 7 will normally indicate many hundreds of incoming links. As you say DigitalV that you have almost zero incoming links from other sites I think we are talking at cross purposes when we speak about Page Rank.

Link popularity and its associated Page Rank is not the "be all and end all" for Google rankings but it certainly is one aspect of Google's algorithm, and without a Page Rank being assigned to the page, the pages will underperform in the search engine results.

I will certainly look at the other options for "pulling in" my catalogue pages, either includes or function calls or whatever. Just need to get away from the?

[digitalv]

OK I think we have some confusion with the term Page Rank

No confusion at all, I know what PageRank is. I shouldn't have said zero, but it's pretty close to zero :) The few links I do have are from authorities, which is how the PR got so high. It's not the QUANTITY of links that determine PR, it's the QUALITY.

And again, it's not the? or querystring data that's hurting you, a page with querystring data is treated as a separate page by Google.

viewProduct.asp?id=whatever

and

viewProductWhatever.asp

Are treated no differently by Google. If you go and redesign your website you're still going to have the exact same problem you have right now. Your problem isn't with the querystring. I'm trying to save you a lot of time - nothing is going to change if you redesign your cart over this.

[Janet]

Ok so we do understand each other on Page Rank and what it means. If the problem then is not the query string, do you have any ideas what it could be? Remember the pages ARE indexed, so it's not that google cannot access/spider/read them. It's to do with passing of PR.

As I said earlier, "I still cannot understand though, why my shopping catalogue pages are consistently showing as "not ranked". The site is 3 months old, with all non query string pages showing at least a PR3. Home page is PR5, all foo.asp pages linking from home page are PR4 while all shopfoo.asp?catid=99 pages linking from home page are "not ranked".

Your insights are most welcome. Please sticky me if you want the url.

[defanjos]

Janet,

I'll bet if you enter the url shopfoo.asp?catid=99 into Google, then click on the first and only result there (your page), the page will show PR.

I've had this problem for a while with one of my sites, not quiet sure why.

[Janet]

Nope defanjos. That doesn't make any difference.