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I discovered it by viewing my site thru the Lynx viewer utility. I could check that the short syntax
[mysite.com...] (1)
does link to a white page, so I figure that spiders should be lost with this syntax too.
Instead, using the full syntax :
[mysite.com...] (2)
makes the url less fancy but at least visible by the Lynx viewer.
I jumped to the conclusion that if I want all the pages of my site to be indexed I should only implement the full syntax (2).
Anyone in the community who could confirm or deny?
Thanks.
Good conclusion. ;)
I neither can confirm nor deny 100% but imo it's unnatural to use a "shortened" version. It's somehow against the "natural" set up of a website which normaly uses either a directory (/directory/) after the host.domain.tld part or a page /index.php or a method method?var=value but not just /?.
Reasons:
- I find (subjective) that it's quite impossible to block such a url through robots.txt. Disallow /? wouldn't work, i guess.
- Also, it could become a mess to code rewrite rules if you just have params to identify the apropriate action - maybe you need rewrite in future - one never knows.
- One also never knows if all search engine indexers will always parse your url correctly. They could get confused if they don't find anything between / and ?. I'm currently testing the former udm search which is pretty much rfc conform and could give us a picture. I'll set up a test site tommorow using just www.example.com/?y=x" and report back how the crawler behaves with it.
However, even if you wouldn't want to disallow or rewrite any url in future, it should be possible. If not i expect it to be not rfc / w3c standard ... allthough i really don't know for sure.
If you properly use /directory/page.php pattern you should be more safe and more flexible if one day changes must be made to the structure.
btw: why do you want to use this short version at all? Why not use a action name for your urls?
try to check out the homepage in my profile.
