Tips for Helping Google Index Dynamic Pages

[dvduval]

4 important concepts for making sure dynamic pages are indexed:

1. All pages have a unique and descriptive title
2. The pages don't have an excessively long URL. Once you above about 50 characters, the chance of the page being indexed declines rapidly. Over 90 - almost never.
3. The page is not deep in a directory such as: domain.com/i-am-great/why/reasons/press-releases/he-is-great.php. Better: domain.com/he-is-great.php
4. There are several links to the page. In other words, you should have good site navigation.

Any other tips you would add?

[Weblamer]

oops, i just posted this as a problem of mine in a different post. ah well, someone will point it out soon enough.

These mod rewrites are all fine and good for unix servers where you have nice shell access, but what about us poor windows server people who have their site hosted externally. is there any way around this?

[andreasfriedrich]

Shell acsess is not needed to use mod_rewrite. All you need is an Apache server and mod_rewrite. It does not matter whether Apache is running under GNU/Linux or Windows.

Andreas

[dspeake]

Absolutely Andreas, I've had Apache working on Win2k, XP, Redhat, Mandrake, etc, etc. I believe it can even run on Win98 (god forbid).

If however the server is running IIS (again, god forbid!) then you need to have administrative access to the IIS setup in order to do the equivalent of a .htaccess, althouh some hosts provide this functionability through a control panel.

[hakre]

to dspeake: it runs on win98. no prob. and i would prefer it instead of using xp if 2k is not avail.

[mbennie]

This can be done on a Win2K server.

Change your navigation to www.yoursite.com/variable.htm.

Then create a 404.asp page and write asp code that transfers the correct file based upon whatever the variables are.

My 404 page has a pretty simple select case statement that parses the URL and then uses server.transfer to get the correct page with the appropriate parameters.

A couple tips...

You have to convert the parameter to a session variable or it will not work.

Make sure you include a 'case else' that transfers the real 404 page.

It's not all that complicated and it works like a charm. Once I converted to this system Google finally crawled all of my pages after a year.

If you want the code I use, sticky mail me.

[copongcopong]

How about if a server does not allow mod_write or .htaccess for me to accomplish search friendly urls, i am using php, any ideas or good suggestions?

Thanks.

[hakre]

to copongcopong:

then i would write a script which generates individual php files in which the id will be set and the output page included:
product22.php
<?
$id=22;
include('proddisp.php');
?>

for example. then you a script to generate all possible files (they won't be linked, if the product does not exists) and you're fine to go.