optimising ASP pages

[curly_clare]

Hi,

I have developed a page named www.mydomain.com/login.asp. Basically i need to know the best way to submit this to the search engines. i know that SE robots will not index URL's when they are followed by a question mark (i.e. www.mydomain.com/login.asp?country=us) but does this same rule apply to simple .asp pages?

Please discus, oh..and thanks for your time.

[Grumpus]

You can use questionmarks just fine. Just not a ton of variables, is all.

You may run into trouble with a pagename like "login.asp" for the simple fact that the Googlebot is pretty smart and it might realize that since it's a robot, it can't possibly login, so it may not bother with that page.

G.

[korkus2000]

What Grumpus said and get external or internal links pointing at it that are in SE. Don't worry about the .asp extension.

[lachtzu]

So then if the bot follows the? to a dynamically generated, say, product listing page, will it read text for the products? (the text ends up in html tables & falls within the 1st 101K of the page)

For instance:
Widgetsite.com/default.asp?page=x&sn=y

G-bot will read all my juicy keywords on page x for product y?
Also, will it then catalog the entire viewable page as a unique page, or only that portion of it unique to pagex producty?

[Jack_Straw]

Well, you have to link to the url from a page it has already found. There is no magic. The spider will not try all possible permutations of parameters.

But, if it spiders a page and sees a link to a dynamic page with, say "...?page=3&sn=a", then it will probably spider that page. If you have another page with "...?page=3&sn=b", but the spider never sees a link with those parameters, that page will not be spidered or indexed.

[Grumpus]

Yeah, you need some sort of a crawlable map not a search box or anything like that. If you look at the site in my profile, you'll see I've got "What's New" stuff on the middle of the front page along with links to a MAP page for each type of thing sorted by newest updates to oldest. The bot moves along this map to find stuff.

G.