[thelist] Indexing by Search Engines of dynamically created documents.

[Andy Warwick]

on 7/12/00 6:14 pm, John Loy at ArtsSciWeb at virginia.edu wrote:

<snip>

> There is a problem
> though. If I set things up so that the article text is in a database
> and is flowed into a Cold Fusion or PHP document or such, then how do
> I insure that the major search engines will turn up results that
> point to the articles.
<snip>
> If the article is never actually a real HTML
> document residing somewhere under the site root then how will spiders
> index the stories? If there is a trick to getting these articles
> indexed please let me know.

John

You don't say what server/platform this will be running on, but one possible
solution using PHP and Apache is detailed in an article on PHPBuilder at

    http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20000526.php3

I've got it working great on my setup.

>From the article summary:

"This forces every request that starts with "/local/" to call a script
called "local" (just "local", not "local.php3") in the $DOCUMENT_ROOT
(usually called "/htdocs/") of your server. "local" then uses PHP to parse
the URL and act accordingly."

So you could have a URI of the form http://www.virginia.edu/local/foo/bar
that calls a script called "local" that parses foo and bar into variables
and calls a database to retrieve data for that page.

You can use a static page and a script to create a summary list of all such
pseudo-static URI's for spiders to follow.

HTH

Regards

Andy Warwick