Search engines and database driven sites

[jimoblak]

I run a site that has only one page: index.php

It dishes out different pages by passing the variable $page. Ex:

http://www.mydomain.com/index.php?page=pickles

Conventional wisdom said that this is a lousy way to have your site listed in search engine results since many spiders ignore what follows the ? in the URL. However, the majority of my traffic is from search engines. It appears that modern search engines are capable of cataloging database driven sites.

I am wondering if I can change something to help all other spiders that do not easily handle database driven sites. Does anyone have any suggestions?

The only thing that I can think of is to have the 404/error page tweaked to handle the requests... Ex: if you present the link of

http://www.mydomain.com/pickles.html,

the 404/error page could extract pickles from the URL and then serve up

http://www.mydomain.com/index.php?page=

pickles - - - but this could reak havoc on site logs.

- - picklefish - -

Why is everyone in this forum responding to me as picklefish?

 

[DRJ478]

Have you ever considered using mod_rewrite to create virtual URLs? Instead of index.php?page=whatever it could use

http://www.yoursite.com/whatever.html

and rewrite it like you suggest for the 404 hack. This makes virtual 'static' appearing pages that are fed from a dynamic backend.

You need Apache, mod_rewrite and the proper permissions.

The 404 page is a real bad hack. mod_rewrite would be the way to go.