openmind — Sat, 11 Oct 2003 22:08:34 +0000

Odd you should mention it but I actually wrote a ColdFusion script to get rid of all the ?'s and the &'s in URL's an replace them with /'s to make the crawlers think the URL's were actually folders. so from this:

yourdomain.com/page.cfm?Var1=1&var2=2&var3=3 became this:

yourdomain.com/page.cfm/Var1/1/Var2/2/Var3/3

This way each and every dynamic page gets indexed. The tutorial is here but you do need a basic understanding of ColdFusion to implement it. The nice thing is you don't have to rewrite your queries, just your URL's. But they can dynamically generated as well so as long as you set the site up properly in the first place, the workload is minmal.

Did you get my seperate email re: the contra-deal I suggested?

tjstemple — Sat, 11 Oct 2003 21:51:45 +0000

Thanks, Flipper. I've read that Google "won't read past the question mark" in dynamic urls. For example, my website has a static page -- moxa.com/product/Serial_Device_Servers/4_Port/NPort_5400.htm -- which Google reads and has links to. The page just mentioned has a link to the following url -- http://web2.moxa.com.tw/services/documentation/documentation.asp?id=249 -- which when opened has links to pdf files for user's manuals. However, Google apparently has no links to those pdf files. If Google deletes the question mark and everything after it before linking, it would actually link to the page --http://web2.moxa.com.tw/services/documentation/documentation.asp -- which exists, but which has no hyperlinks to any user's manuals. So I guess I need to find someone who understands this problem and knows how to work around it.

openmind — Sat, 11 Oct 2003 17:27:55 +0000

It really depend what you want to drive on the site using the DB. There are various languages, ASP, ColdFusion, PHP, etc you could use and they each have their own strenghts and weaknesses.

It can make life alot easier to update the site through a database as well as giving people with little or no HTML experience the ability to change certain sections.

As for the SE question, using a database should not affect your keyword rankings. You may find that some sections of the ste may not get crawled if they are linked to by dynamic URL's i.e. moxa.com/databasePage.cfm?ID=1. There are ways round this though.