[thelist] How do they do that?

[Judah McAuley]

Daniel Fascia wrote:
> A great deal of large, corporate websites who blatantly have content management systems in place seem to now use
> flat files instead of the usual ?page=734327434&la=qy234y24 crap that screws up search engines.
>
> This may seem like a very niaive question but what sort of system are they using to create this?
>
> Does the CMS churn out flat html pages as soon as the edits are made or what??? really confused and the answer is
> probably really simple ;-)

Two main options.

1) You can churn out static HTML pages when a backend system updates.
This is good for sites that don't update often.

2) URL masking by redirection.  Create a valid, static looking url
(http://mysite.com/news/current/ournewupdate.html) and invoke a custom
404 page that parses the URL and delivers the correct content.  In this
case, the custom 404 might see that the app in question is the news
application, the category is "current" and the particular article is
called ournewupdate.  That's a fake example, but that's what good CMS's
will do these days to make URL's that provide accurate, SE friendly
context for the actual content.

You'll find a few articles about search engine friendly URL's on Evolt.
  Take a look at:
http://www.evolt.org/article/Search_Engine_Friendly_URLs_with_PHP_and_Apache/17/15049/index.html

You may notice that that link itself is a faked, search engine friendly
URL.  If you have a particular language you are interested in, folks on
this list should be able to help you with an implentation strategy.

HTH,
Judah