Google Following PHP Pages - Question

[ToddW]

Ok - more and more of my pages are .PHP now and the more dynamic I can make the site the easier they are for me.

My question is can google follow the hyerlinks and spyder the page content.. pages such as

mysite.com/icons.php?page=1

then on the bottom of that page it says
mysite.com/icons.php?page=2

Will google know to goto page 2? Or should I learn howt o use mod_rewerite to allow google to index better?

I am making a search engine for some sites and will contain a "DIRECTORY" url that will have all searched keywords added, so that google can spyder it easier but if the above doesn't work then I have to think of something new..

[hatchet]

Google can follow it without much of a problem. When it can't follow it well is when there are things like session ids. I'm sure someone will have a better explanation that just that.

[ToddW]

Ok, so as long as I don't use Sessions I`m ok?

On another note, on another site of mine I do use sessions to keep track if a user is logged in or not, but would this limit google from following pages that just 'start' a session but don't track the user or track session variables at all?

[TanyaMartin]

Try not to go over using more then 2 variables in your site. page=2 is fine. If a session is required then google can't spider it.

[ToddW]

Thanks!

What about

variable=bla|bla|bla|bla|bla

where I use my own parser to detect multiple variables?

[TanyaMartin]

I have one site that does that, it does get listings, but it doesn't seem like that last long or go up high.

[ToddW]

Gotcha, I`ll try to keep it to one variable.

Or better yet I may do something like

mysite.com/keyword.php

Where keyword is the term searched, then hard code that in...

Options

[digitalpoint]

You could get a little tricky too with a mod_rewrite (if you are using Apache as your web server). So instead of having a bunch of php files (one for each keyword), so it like this:

have a .htaccess file with something like:

RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z]+)\.html$ /keywords.php?word=$1 [L]

Then any .html file you have within that directory will simply be rewritten on the backend. For example the user's browser requests phonebook.html, and even though that file never actually exists, on the backend it's rewritten as /keywords.php?word=phonebook

Makes it much cleaner if you are going to have a lot of pages that are dynamic...

- Shawn

[ToddW]

Originally Posted by digitalpoint

You could get a little tricky too with a mod_rewrite (if you are using Apache as your web server). So instead of having a bunch of php files (one for each keyword), so it like this:

have a .htaccess file with something like:

RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z]+)\.html$ /keywords.php?word=$1 [L]

Then any .html file you have within that directory will simply be rewritten on the backend. For example the user's browser requests phonebook.html, and even though that file never actually exists, on the backend it's rewritten as /keywords.php?word=phonebook

Makes it much cleaner if you are going to have a lot of pages that are dynamic...

- Shawn

That's what I need! How do I learn about doing that because I run TONS of my own websites, and 90% are all PHP and look terrible for search engines...

Where do I learn to do this?
And can I have different mod_rewrite's for each site?

[digitalpoint]

I'm sure they are out there, but I don't know of a specific tutorial on it... Other than the apache docs on it:

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/misc/rewriteguide.html
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html

As far as how many rules you can have, you can have an infinite number of rewrites per directory, file, site, whatever you want...

- Shawn

[Gede]

Recently I took a look at osCommerce, the GPL shopping cart.

I don't have url rewriting on my server, so I was sad. osCommerce programmers made me happy. SE "friendly" php urls without rewriting ...

It looks like this:

http://www.somesite.com/some-php-pag...i/33/c/14/pn/1

normal it would look like this

http://www.somesite.com/some-php-pag...i=33&c=14&pn=1

I checked osCommerce sites an google likes those kind of urls.

Currently I am "learning this trick". next sites will be done like this...

Maybe the rest in coding, once....

[Emancipator]

With my shopping cart I am writing the system so that it creates static pages as well as dynamic pages. I have also considered the rewrite since it really is a great idea.

[digitalpoint]

Originally Posted by Gede

Recently I took a look at osCommerce, the GPL shopping cart.

I don't have url rewriting on my server, so I was sad. osCommerce programmers made me happy. SE "friendly" php urls without rewriting ...

It looks like this:

http://www.somesite.com/some-php-pag...i/33/c/14/pn/1

normal it would look like this

http://www.somesite.com/some-php-pag...i=33&c=14&pn=1

It sure looks like they are rewriting the URLs to me... Are you sure they aren't using mod_rewrite to do it? There is no .htaccess file in your oscommerce directory?

- Shawn

[Gede]

No, no rewrite,

basicly it comes down to this:

From my experiments: (You speak php so...)

[code:1:d9c0309b7c]$basesite="http://pemaron/sehot/";

if (strlen(getenv('PATH_INFO')) > 1) {
$GET_array = array();
$PHP_SELF = str_replace(getenv('PATH_INFO'), '', $PHP_SELF);
$vars = explode('/', substr(getenv('PATH_INFO'), 1));
for ($i=0, $n=sizeof($vars); $i<$n; $i++) {
if (strpos($vars[$i], '[]')) {
$GET_array[substr($vars[$i], 0, -2)][] = $vars[$i+1];
} else {
$HTTP_GET_VARS[$vars[$i]] = $vars[$i+1];
}
$i++;
}

if (sizeof($GET_array) > 0) {
while (list($key, $value) = each($GET_array)) {
$HTTP_GET_VARS[$key] = $value;
}
}
}

$p=$HTTP_GET_VARS[p];
$pn=$HTTP_GET_VARS[pn];
$c=$HTTP_GET_VARS[c];
$i=$HTTP_GET_VARS[i];
$r=$HTTP_GET_VARS[r];

function ref_link($slink) {
$slink = str_replace('?', '/', $slink);
$slink = str_replace('&', '/', $slink);
$slink = str_replace('=', '/', $slink);
$slink = str_replace(' ', '-', $slink);
return $slink;
[/code:1:d9c0309b7c]

[digitalpoint]

Ah... yep, that definitely would work... I forgot that you can expand on the php filename and the right PHP file still responds...

- Shawn

[Gede]

I have put some of the osCommerce stuff in here:

http://www.balihotelguide.com/

Curious how it works out...

[sim]

Im using session's anyway. Google gonna tell me to go screw myself then they can die. Tons of people will be linking to my site anyway and most page ranks are first page and google will list the first page of my site. So as long as they shows up on search engines, it should be fine.



How you gonna show logged in user's without sessions?
1) Include it in the URL
?User=What&Pass=Who
2)Store it on server with time out from IP

[digitalpoint]

... or us a cookie instead...

- Shawn

[sim]

What about people who have cookie's disabled?

You cant create a cookie after print html to a page, so it gets really complicated.