[thelist] Tricking the Search Engines

Marcia Welter mhwelter at welterweb.com
Fri Mar 8 13:11:01 CST 2002


>Yes -- but is there any hard evidence that better SE rankings will result
purely by replacing .asp or .php extensions with .htm ones? This solution
still doesn't address the fact that some (not all) SEs will barf on query
strings. If your ASP page doesn't use a query string, as far as I know it
will rank no worse than an equivalent HTM page would. (Disclaimer: I'm no
SE expert, but this tallies with my experience).

I don't think there's been any hard evidence, which I doubt would be
possible because there are so many more html and htm pages than the others.
There's been considerable discussion on it at Webmaster World, and I can't
remember the figures exactly, but it was enough to convince me to stay with
htm and html. I optimized a Cold Fusion site and put most all the
descriptive text on html pages wherever possible. With all things equal, the
html pages ranked well, better than equivalent .cfm pages with descriptive
text (no query strings). But that's certainly not definitive.

Someone specifically mentioned that his asp pages didn't get indexed with 4
parameters but did when he tweaked back to 2 parameters. I can't remember if
they were crawled or whether he had to hand submit those pages individually.
At one time search engines didn't index URLs with query strings at all, but
some do now, they're not all the same. Ask and Inktomi take dynamic pages as
long as they're paid for, inconsequential where Google is concerned.

I don't think anything can be definitive without enough of a data set to
work with. It was done a while back, but things have changed over time.

Marcia






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