Altavista not spidering certain URLs

www.sitename.com/widgets.php/1234

[ALbino]

I don't usually pay much attention to Altavista, but today I decided to take a look at it and see how my ranking is for various keywords that I track for Google. Surprise, surprise but there are only 15 pages indexed out of ~10,000. Looking closer at the results all the main pages are indexed, but none of my 'dynamic' pages are. I converted all of my query string pages a couple years ago to what I thought were more spiderable URLs. For example instead of:

http://www.example.com/widgets.php?q=1234

I now use:

http://www.example.com/widgets.php/1234

This seems to work fine for Google, ATW, etc. I'm just wondering why it doesn't work for Altavista. Maybe I'm doing something wrong? I don't honestly think Altavista will generate me much traffic, but if the problem is correctable it's probably worth doing. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

[edited by: engine at 10:06 am (utc) on Sep. 22, 2003]
[edit reason] examplified and de-linked [/edit]

[div01]

I am in the exact same boat. My main page is spidered quite often by Scooter, but it doesn't go very far. I have a nice site map just waiting for it...if only it would take the bait. :(

[sidyadav]

I "had" the same problem but couldn't get a solution so had to change the "WHOLE" website to directories (ie. http://example.com/dir/page/ etc) did this with mod_rewrite and now its all fine.

Sid

[edited by: engine at 10:06 am (utc) on Sep. 22, 2003]
[edit reason] examplified and de-linked [/edit]

[ALbino]

I was afraid that was the only solution. That seems absurd. Does AV consider the '.' character to signify the end of a URL? What if somebody names their URLs [sitename.com...] Will it stop at green.widgets and never see home.html? Renaming all of my pages might have been an okay solution a couple years ago, but I have deeplinks from people everywhere that I would hate to lose or redirect without a better reason than just trying to get AV's small percentage of traffic. Anybody know if Altavista is taking steps to correct this?

[ALbino]

If I purchased a URL inclusion from Altavista to a deep page in my site what are the odds that AV would then be able to spider the rest of the 'deep' pages? I'm just throwing this out there, it doesn't seem that likely to be honest :)