does the spider see this page

does search engine read index.php?/link=page

[lindavh]

http://www.example.com/index.php?link=injectables_services

Does the spider read the page above or does the? prohibit it from following?
Thanks, Linda

[edited by: dreamcatcher at 7:28 am (utc) on May 2, 2007]
[edit reason] Use example.com, thanks. [/edit]

[DamonHD]

Hi,

AFAIK the SEs can all read and index pages with a few (maybe up to 3) query parameters providing a few conditions are met.

G certainly indexes lots of my pages with a specific 'change language' parameter and so gets to index multiple language versions of each page for me, which is good.

Rgds

Damon

[joelgreen]

Google and Yahoo will not have problems with it. Not sure about other SEs.

[lindavh]

Thank you for responding to my question!
I can see that Google is indexing the pages with the search string ending with the
http://www.example.com/index.php?link=injectables_services .

The title and meta tags are being generated from the index page, right?

Does that mean that for SEO ranking it is not a good format because the title is virtual and so I am getting less value?

I am trying to see if I can optimize this site from content only, but is it better to have control of the title and keywords on the page and not generated by the index?

I obviously have never worked in php and understand only a little about it works with the tags being generated from another page.

I did not build the php site, only offered to optimize the content and the titles, but have been stuck with the virtual page having all the tags.

Any suggestions? Thanks so much in advance. I don't know what to tell the client.

[bajaguy]

Virtual or dynamic pages, which are generated from pulling content from a data base or a file, are only indexed when they are generated by a visitor and then stored in the server's cache. It is here that the googlebot will find and index these pages. As they will appear as static pages for as long the cache lives. So even if you have a? in the URL Google will go ahead and index them. This is why getting traffic to your website will rank you higher in the SE.

But this will only be temporary and is not a solid way to index pages. Static pages have the SE preference in this case as they always have their title and meta tags at any given time as opposed to dynamic pages.

[FiRe]

In Apache you can use mod_rewrite to solve this issue. In a .htaccess file put:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^link/(.*) index.php?link=$1

Now you can access the page via:
http://www.example.com/link/injectables_services

Which is much more SEO friendly :-)