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A Website in Perl.

         

andysood

9:18 pm on Oct 9, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I want to improve the ranking of website where currently I am working. The problem is the index.html file in the root redirects the file to a cgi file like www/home.cgi and hence in google there is no listing of this page. Is it that the Google bot does not read CGI. Should I submit the whole url of the home page as [websiteurl...] to google addurl so that it can read this file.Please help me with this guys how I can improve on this.

athinktank

10:44 pm on Oct 9, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Do you have the ability to change the way that the server is now?

Can you change your index.html page so that it cannot redirect? If so, replace the redirection with a static page.

do you ahve the ability to change the architecture so that you have dynamic pages but they look like they are static?

another choice would be to soft link index.html to www/home.cgi, that is if you are on a *nix server.

I guess to fully answer your question, one would have to look at your code and see all that is going on.

claus

10:56 pm on Oct 9, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Welcome to WebmasterWorld andysood :)

In general Google does not like pages that does nothing but redirect to other pages. On the other hand perfectly fine html can be output and indexed using perl in the backend without problems - this forum is a fine example i believe :)

Some webmasters in here use a setting in their .htaccess files (Apache webserver) to allow files with a html extension to be interpreted as php by the server. You could do the same with cgi.

Otherwise, you could specify that your server should be able to use an "index.cgi" file as default page in stead of the "index.html" that currently serves no purpose and hence does nothing good for your site.

As long as you output spiderable html to the Google spider, i'd say your technology choice is less important.

/claus

andysood

10:10 pm on Oct 12, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I believe we cannot put our website url here, but is it possible somehow to give you people to url so that you can see what is happening in my website.
rgds

claus

10:30 pm on Oct 12, 2003 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



From what you wrote, i understand your problem to be this:

www.example.com/ is your root. When this is entered into a browser, it forwards to another page: www.example.com/www/home.cgi

(1) This means that your index page is a "splash page" and Google does not really like those. You should try to avoid these if you can.

(2) The forward - how is this done? If it is done by means of javascript, then Google will never see "home.cgi" as it does not follow javascript.

(3) Text links - does "index.html" have a plain text link to "home.cgi"? Googlebot will need that to follow the redirect.

(4) mod_rewrite - if you have access to mod_rewrite on the server you can get "home.cgi" shown when "index.html" is requested, it's called an "internal rewrite"

(5) SSI - do you have access to ServerSide Includes? That way, you can include "home.cgi" in "index.html". You might have to rename the file to "index.shtml", but that extension is no problem to Google.

(6) CGI Indexes - i'm not sure exactly how to enable it if it's not enabled already, but you could simply rename "home.cgi" to "index.cgi", place it in your root, and then delete "index.html".

/claus

andysood

11:18 pm on Oct 12, 2003 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



thank you for your feedback and I will work on it and let you know. I do have access to apache and mod_rewrite but I feel an include looks a better option as it is easier.
rgds
Andy