[thelist] Searchable dynamic content

Chuck Gartland chuck at project27.com
Fri Jan 11 07:37:46 CST 2002


Bill Haenel wrote -
> I've asked a bit about this before, and have looked around for books, etc.
> Mostly what I've found has been related to URL interpretation. However, I
> don't think that has much relevance in this case:
>
> The content of our new fancy-wancy dynamically updated news page does not
> seem to be searchable by, say, Google. The page is located at this
address:
>
> http://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news.php

The above URL should not actually deliver a page (I mean in theory, not in
as it is written). If news.php delivers dynamic content then news.php is the
only page to get indexed. It will propably sit cached by search engines for
streaches as long as six months and only be indexed a couple itmes a year.

I would suggest that requests for news.php be redirected to something like
news.php?issue=thisdate. Many search engines may ignore everything after the
'?' though. So you should use some technique to rewrite the url to a SE
pleasing one. http://wwwalistapart.com/stories/succeed/ is a good article on
using .htaccess and mod_rewrite for this, though it is possible to rewrite
the url in your php. Lastly you will probably want to write each issue to
disk so the issues indexed by search engines can be reached and for
archiving. There is a growing number of template engines out there for php
that work well, PSP and FastTemplate come to mind.

Chuck
project27





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