Dynamic link structure

I think I may have blocked bots

[Birdman]

Hello everyone. I just did my first dynamic web site and noticed that a certain, very important, robot didn't follow the dynamic links. It only read the static pages.

Here is the link format:
<a href='http://www.mysite.com/widget_catalog.html/red widgets/1'>
<a href='http://www.mysite.com/widget_catalog.html/blue widgets/2'>
<a href='http://www.mysite.com/widget_catalog.html/green widgets/3'>

Now, I know my first mistake was using spaces. Now they show as /red%20widgets/

Do these links look unspiderable? Thanks for any advice!

[Birdman]

I really don't need the /red widget/ portion of the url. That bit is the category name, which I added for keywords. Would I be better off using:

.html?cat_id=1

[ukgimp]

That method works for me (eg?id=X). Unique content and titles for each page and easy navigation. I would love to rewrite the urls to static but that site is on a server where I cannot.

Cheers

[Birdman]

I may just go ahead and change them, but I was wondering if the format I'm using now is keeping Gbot away from those pages. This is what it looks like:

www.mysite.com/widget_catalog.html/red%20widgets/1

Like I said, I'll probably go ahead and change it to be safe, but I want to verify that it is the reason that Gb wouldn't touch them. Fast did read some of them. Thanks for the reply ukgimp:)

[Dreamquick]

I wouldnt expect the googlebot to have a problem with properly encoded spaces in URLs - after all lots of people probably use them!

The only big danger I see is that if you used longer, more verbose, names and/or more "directories" in the url you may create urls which are too long and which could potentially be ignored (presumably due to depth of crawl restrictions and/or anti-spam filters)

- tony

[Trisha]

No one has mentioned this yet, so maybe I'm way off here, but it seems like having the ".html" part in the middle of the URL could be a problem.

Could you change it to:

www.mysite.com/widget_catalog/redwidgets/1

and get rid of the space too?

I am in the process of getting my first dynamic site up also, it's sort of done but not official yet, so no links for Google to find yet, so I don't know if the way mine are set up will be liked either. I made mine of the form:

www.mydomain.com/subject/category/unique_article_id

I'm curious to know what you decide to do, as I could still change mine if necessary, since nothing has been indexed yet.

[Birdman]

you may create urls which are too long

Yes I agree. I believe I will remove the category name. I just thought it would help to have kws in the url, but it is kind of long.

The category name in the url is added dynamically but I originally created that row for the headings of each catalog section, hence the spaces.

having the ".html" part in the middle of the URL could be a problem.

I was thinking the same, Trisha. It seems like you are in another level, when really all the files are in root. I messed with my relative links also so I changed them to absolute.

I will most likely scrap that structure and go to something like this:
<a href='http://www.mysite.com/widget_catalog.html?cat=3'>
At least this way it doesn't appear to be in a different directory.

[Birdman]

It's official! Googlebot did not index any of my dynamic pages with these links:
h**p://www.mysite.com/widget_catalog.html/red widgets/1

So now I'm going to change them to this:
h**p://www.mysite.com/1/widget_catalog.html
h**p://www.mysite.com/2/widget_catalog.html
h**p://www.mysite.com/3/widget_catalog.html

Could anyone tell me the best way to set the number in the url to a variable on the widget_catalog page?