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S
srushing
Known Participant
August 24, 2006
Question

search engines and dynamic pages and CF

  • August 24, 2006
  • 2 replies
  • 517 views
when I search google for a product, say a DVD player, I see that some companies have been able to get the search engines to index their product listings. In doing some research it seems that one way they've done this is to make it look like each product has a static page by replacing the query string character "?" with "/" so the URL looks like a static page when really the server is pulling dynamic content. I saw one reference to the following line in one of the articles which referred to Coldfusion:

Reconfigure your Cold Fusion setup to replace the "?" in a query string with a '/' and pass the value to the URL. The browser interprets that as a static URL page.

Has anyone done this? I have a product database I'd like to get indexed so in theory if I create a single page on my server that has static links to all the products, each getting called by the mocked up "static" URL, it seems like that will work. The bigger quesiton is how does one go about changing the query string in CF and does it apply to everything, meaning all the existing pages I've built on the site that pass URL variables using "?", will those have to be rebuilt now that the query string is changed?

Thanks
S
This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

N
Newsgroup_User
Inspiring
August 24, 2006
Despite many posts on this issue, I am skeptical that there is a problem
with search engines indexing pages with query strings. I have a number
of pages with URLs like showdetail.cfm?articleID=25 and they are always
indexed by Google and other search engines.

It is my understanding it largely depends on how you link to the detail
pages. If you have direct anchors to the detail pages Google will index
them. If you use a form or something else, Google is much less likely
to follow.

For example:
<a href="showdetail.cfm?articleID=25">The best red ball ever</a>
<!--- This will be followed by Google to be indexed--->

<form action="showdetail.cfm" method="get">
<select name="articleID">
<option value="25">The best red ball ever<option>
<option value="26">The best green ball ever<option>
<option value="27">The best blue ball ever<option>
</select>
<input type="submit"/>
</form>
<!--- This will not be followed by Google to index the detail pages. --->

This makes some sense, because how can a robot complete a form even if
it could determine it is for navigation.
D
dempster
Inspiring
August 24, 2006
Ian is right - the key to indexing is the presence of a link that a robot can follow. And of course the same ranking algorithms will apply, so the more relevant pages that link specifcally to your page, the better your rank.
S
srushingAuthor
Known Participant
August 24, 2006
Thanks on the responses. So here's a followup....so if I have a file that has links to all my products, that file itself will get indexed into the search engine as well, correct? Which would mean that in a search result, it's possible that my file containing all my products will come back as a result and someone could go directly to that page. So I'm not 100% sure I have a problem with that but I'm a little uneasy about someone being able to grab that page and get links to all my stuff.

Is it possible to detect when a spider is view a page vs visitor so I could redirect the interactive visitor to my main page instead of that listing?

Just curious...thanks
S
D
dempster
Inspiring
August 24, 2006
Despite many posts on this issue, I am skeptical that there is a problem with search engines indexing pages with query strings. I have a number of pages with URLs like showdetail.cfm?articleID=25 and they are always indexed by Google and other search engines.

Having said that, you can use a format like this: showdetail.cfm/25

The CGI variable PATH_INFO should return the string that follows the page name.
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