Dynamic site & SE

yes, again :)

[transistor]

Well, now that I have a very nice site where directories like /artist/1 give you /artist/1.html (which in turn is the data of an artist), what should I do (if anything) to "tell" the search engine's spider/robot to index the thousands (ok, maybe hundreds... ok, maybe a few dozens) of artists and so on and so forth?
Every page (one script, of course) generates it's own meta tags, keywords, title, etc.
What should I do?
Thanks!

[agerhart]

If the pages are output to URLs that have the extension .html, and are linked to properly from within the site, than most of the search engines should have no problems picking them up on their own. Submit the root (index.html) of your site.

[transistor]

Thanks Agerhart.
I see... but I don't, I mean, there's only one script (.php) which delivers the artist (id=x, where x is an integer number), so how would a SE know how many artists I have and index them all?
What I would do, based on what you are saying here, is make a PHP script that builds an html containing links to all the artists, one after another.
Then, put it somewhere where the robot/spider will index, so that will take care of it, right?
What do you think, is this correct? has someone made it another way?
Thanks!

[agerhart]

A static sitemap may take care of your problem.

What do you your URLs look like?
This: www.yourdomain.com/artist.php?id=artist
or
This: www.yourdomain.com/artist/artist1.htm

[transistor]

www.mydomain.com/artist.php?id=1
So, you think it is a good idea to create a html page with all the links to the artists?
How about the ? (question mark)? I've been reading a lot about it being kinda troublesome.
Because the html page would look something like this
<a href="artitst.php?id=1">Artist Name 1</a>
<a href="artitst.php?id=2">Artist Name 2</a>
etc...
In general, will SE index these pages?

[transistor]

Aha! after lots of reading and writing I think I might have found a solution to my issue and might be of interest to others.
I wrote a PHP script that works when an error 404 is found when a user requests, say, www.domain.com/somename.
The script checks for the existance of "somename" (in my database) and if it does, the browser is redirected to www.domain.com/artist/x/somename.html
Then a RewriteRule "feeds" the value of "x" to a script in artist to retrieve the info.
Now, I have to generate an html file that will contain links like so:
<a href="/artist/x/name.html">name</a>
<a href="/artist/x+1/othername.html">other name</a>
etc...
so, when a spider comes along, it can follow every artist in my site with this single html file.
How about that?! :)

Any remarks, observations, tips, etc.?
Thanks!

[agerhart]

This sounds like a good plan, but you should be careful when using redirects. Which type of redirect are you using?

[Nick_W]

Why not just have your urls like this:

www.yoursite.com/artist/3/

in your php you would do something like this:

$path_info=explode('/', $PATH_INFO);
$artist=$path_info[1]
/* get the info for $artist */

You would need to create a file called 'artist' with no extension and put this in your .htaccess:

<Files artist>
ForceType application/x-httpd-php
</Files>

It's a very neat way of doing it and works well for SE's

Nick

[transistor]

Agerhart: I'm using PHP's header("location: blablabla"); EXIT; (I use here uppercase to emphasize I do use exit after a header location) :)
Nick_W: your URL looks good, however, I'm not sure. I think I'd rather have the supposed html file on the URL, if it makes no difference to the SE's spider/robot, but thank you!

[aRs3N1c]

I'm a newbie to SEO. What are the ramifications of having a querystring appended to the end of a URL when it comes to spiders crawling the site.

We are primarily a ColdFusion shop. The majority of our clients are using dynamic content from a database. For example, a site pulls a list of products and product IDs from a DB and dynamically creates links to a products.cfm page with the product ID appended to the URL like so.

www.mydomain.com/products/product.cfm?ID=42

What effect will this have on SEP/SEO? And what does this mean for the trend in dynamic web pages using any of the major players in db connectivity technology (cfm,jsp,asp,php,etc.)?

[transistor]

aRs3N1c, well, apparently there's nothing wrong with dynamic pages with query strings. Maybe some SE will hate them, but probably, most wont.
However the important thing about this topic is that if you don't provide a way for Search Engine Robots/Spiders to find all of your pages, then it's going to be hard to find yourself indexed in a Search Engine.
In my opinion, I don't want to take the chance of not being listed because of the query string, besides, the url looks much more professional (to me) that way :)
The big question, I guess, would be: Do you have a good ranking as you are, today?
If the answer is yes, then why change?
If you don't, well, maybe there's a reason for you to try this.