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I am at an empass. I have a friend who believes in using a flat file system for optimum search engine performance. And, I tend to agree.
However, I have recently gained some valuable knowledge on the "behind-the-scenes" techniques used by a certain retail website that's in a very specialized niche market.
Because I do not have the money to start a proper e-commerce site, I have decided to go the affiliate route. I take the data provided by the site with which I am affiliated and use it to build my own site, with all links leading to the partner site for ordering.
The problem is, I have chosen a couple of products that have a more general appeal but are, according to my research, good bets. However, there are hundreds of products and to make them all into a flat file site is going to take forever, not to mention rather tedious.
I have coded a CMS designed specifically for my primary product using MySQL. This way I can simply copy and paste the information into a form, which is a lot easier than trying to handle hundreds of individual files. And updating product information is a whole lot easier this way.
I'm torn, though. With the flat file system, there are at least 4 levels of pages: The homepage which connects to the category pages, which connect to the sub-category pages which lead to all the product pages in the sub-categories. All of them saturated with relevant filenames, page titles, metas and content.
With the database, I get URLs that look like this:
http*//www.mysite.com/widget/widget-info.php?page=Widget%20Widget%20Widget
The "%20" doesn't bother me so much, but the "?" does.
I'd like to get some opinions on both sides of this issue so that I can at be informed properly before I proceed with populating the site.
BTW, if anyone knows of an easier way that still maintains the site's ability to welcome spiders and bots, please don't hesitate!
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[edited by: caveman at 1:37 am (utc) on Jan. 9, 2006]
[edit reason] Link de-linked [/edit]
Do a google on the term Mod Rewrite
If you are hosted on a linux server, you will more than likley have a file in your root called .htaccess
This file can be manipulated to do all sorts of wonderful things, like re-write...
http*//www.mysite.com/widget/widget-info.php?page=Widget%20Widget%20Widget
Into
http*//www.mysite.com/widget/Widget-Widget-Widget.html
There are many ways to use .htaccess this is why I direct you to google... But if you need a specific example or help, let me know... I currently have a 900 page website which actually only has 6 ASP pages on the server, the use of MODREWRITE and SQL makes the whole website look static, but it is totaly database driven! Great Tool! Search engines love it!
