Re: FN-FORUM: help with getting .php files indexed on search engines

date posted 25th January 2006 14:15

Hi,

Sorry for the late reply, but I have a point which was not covered.

On Tue, Jan 17, 2006 at 05:05:41PM -0000, D D Glendinning wrote:
> Until now I have never really thought of how .php pages are indexed
> in search engines. If for example you have a number of news articles,
> which are listed in summary on news.php page, and full details is
> available on viewNews.php?NewsID=someID, then are the full news pages
> indexed?
> (as in viewNews.php?ID=1, viewNews.php?ID=2, etc..)
[...]
> How can this be done, and can the title, keywords and description of
> the page be altered depending on the article?

We do this (albeit for mod_perl with GET options instead of php, but
it's the same principal), with the fotoserve.com site.

If you use apache as your serving software, you can investigate the
mod_rewrite module - this allows you to 'overlay' a human-readable and
search-engine friendly url scheme on the urls that your application
needs with their GET values.

e.g you can overlay www.mysite.com/news/2.html onto
www.mysite.com/viewNews?ID=2. It's transparent to the end user and to
the application - the visitor can use the url schemes interchangably.

If this is something I can implement for you, please drop me a private
reply. Not everyone is comfortable with apache, and I would be
delighted to help.


Oh - as for changing the titles depending on the article, this depends
on your application. If it's nicely templated, you can be fairly sure
this is a yes.

cheers
-a