URL Rewriting - can it confuse googlebot?

[F_Rose]

We currently have all of our dynamic url's rewritten to static url's.
For example www.widgets.com/bluewidgets.cfm to www.widgets.com/blue-widget.html

Does Google Bots have any problem identifying these rewritten url's?
Are we running into any problems due to the fact that most of our urls are rewritten?

[opifex]

if your old content old.cfm still exists, link them to the new.html and all should go smoothly. bad news is when the old.cfm has actually been indexed and is gone.....

[F_Rose]

Thanks for your response.

We do not have any links going to the old.cfm pages and don't think these pages have ever been indexed yet.

However the rewritten urls new.html, is not being indexed by Google either and that is what is getting us very frustrated.

I can not figure out what is stopping the Google Bots from getting these pages indexed.

P.S. Our home page is crawled pretty often..

[opifex]

try adding the old standard robot meta

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="index">
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="follow">
<meta name="REVISIT-AFTER" content="30 days">

the revisit-after suposedly has no meaning any more, but i still use it to id pages that are modified at different frequencies.

and follow the google robot.txt examples ... works for many ,,, i still havent bothered on any of the sites

good luck

[F_Rose]

Do you really believe that this will get Google to start indexing our pages?

I have feeling thier must be something within our site, that is confusing the Google bots, just can't figure out WHAT?

[F_Rose]

I finally know what the problem is with our site. We have all of our url's rewritten as mentioned above, but we have not done a 301 redirect from our original url's to our new rewritten url's. Google sees these two url's as duplicate pages although nothing is linked to our original url's.

Our website is written in cold fusion, all of our original url's had a .cfm url whith?'s as well. We wanted the url's to have a neater effect, for users and search engines as well, so we had all of our url's rewritten.

If I do a 301 rediret from the old url's to the new url's it creates a loop. Being that the new url pulls the information from the .cfm file, it's considered as one page with two url's.

If I do a 301 redirect from the old to the new, what happens is as follows:
I enter the new url for example: www.example.com/example-big.html
It looks for the .cfm file, but if it's redirected it looks for the new url again, which looks for the .cfm file and for that reason it can not bring up the page..

Cany anyone help me on this, so we can get all of our url's redirected so we can get our pages listed in Google?

[Adam_Lasnik]

F_Rose,

Have you used the Sitemaps tools to do troubleshooting? While this isn't guaranteed to solve this particular conundrum, there's certainly a chance it may shed some light on the situation.

[pageoneresults]

<meta name="REVISIT-AFTER" content="30 days">

Revisit-After META Tag - The Myth Continues [webmasterworld.com]

[F_Rose]

Adam,

Thank you for your response.

We do have a Google site map ever since our site was launched, doesn't seem to help much..

Paogeonresults,

If I do a 7 day revisit, does that mean Google will come back and spider those pages within 7 days?
Have you ever tried this method, does it really work?

What about 301 redirects, any solutions on how to actually make it work without creating a loop?

[jdMorgan]

See the third rule in "A working example" in this library thread: Changing Dynamic URLs to Static URLs [webmasterworld.com]

Jim