Following Archive Links

How to have archives indexed

[stinkee]

www.widgets.com/archive.html has links to older stories. I had a single page that took a querystring parameter to pull the article out of the database. The format of the link was www.widgets.com/widgetstories.html?s=52 (for a specific article).

When searching on keywords for that article, the archive.html page with the link to the article showed up as number one instead of the actual page that has the article.

It looked like the SE I used was not following my archive.html links to the dynamic pages. I read about mod_rewrite and through some work I now have links that read www.widgets.com/widgetstories/52 (for the same article).

When should I expect this new style to begin showing up? I changed it about 10 days ago, but have not seen the new link structure. Is there a way for me to tell if the link structure is better for the search engines? I guess I am wondering if I did the right thing...

[edited by: caveman at 10:58 pm (utc) on April 6, 2006]
[edit reason] Removed specifics, per TOS, and delinked links. [/edit]

[caveman]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld stinkee!

[stinkee]

I think I may have been barking up the wrong tree. I have now noticed that I have an empty sitemap error with google and my sitemap.xml. I am checking that now.

[stinkee]

I have found my problem. It had nothing to do with what I thought. This thread may be deleted.