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pymalion
VP-CART New User

USA
80 Posts

Posted - February 14 2003 :  16:28:07  Show Profile  Visit pymalion's Homepage  Reply with Quote
Hey, I was told that google.com (search engine - who supplies to yahoo, msn, etc..), is starting to rethink how they judge ranking on URLs. There's been discussion here, about URLs with the ? in them, don't get picked up by the search engine indexing. Anyone know more about this? I actually converted our VPASP site over to static product pages, just for the search engines (over 40K pages). But, if ? URL's are getting accepted now, that sure shines a big light on thangs...

Stephen Page
[email protected]

jsbeads
Starting Member

USA
39 Posts

Posted - February 27 2003 :  09:16:37  Show Profile  Visit jsbeads's Homepage  Reply with Quote
Caution wordy post – but I have spent a lot of time working on this. Note: I could be wrong but these are the things that I’ve found.

Yes, google does or can crawl sites that use dynamic pages. However, there are a couple of caveats to that statement.

What criteria are used to determine if a dynamic page is indexable is debatable. Most have found that clean, high ranking (High page rank) sites can get dynamic content indexed.

*****************
The biggest problem are sites that use the session id to identify a page (this is called a spider trap): Such as.
Cart.asp?ID=23456
Cart.asp?ID=345667
….
Etc

Google sees these as unique pages and will reindex your pages repeatedly.
(This is not a problem with VP-ASP).

**********************
Another problem is malformed Query Strings there is a limit on the number of characters in the string that Google will follow. So, keep the string as short as possible.

**********************
Some say, but this is open to debate. The Googlebot (Goggle’s Spider) will follow links from a static url (without the "?"), but will not follow links from a dynamic page (with the "?"). If all of the links from your site's main page are dynamic, googlebot will go to these pages but no further.

**************************
Another thing, is your site set up so that google can index it? For google to find a page you have to have a hard link to that page i.e. <a href= As far as I can tell google does not follow a form-submit , also if you have a search VP-ASP uses session variable to create the SQL statement I doubt that google could handle that. ( I could be wrong)

**********************************
Okay how to get you products into google.
Create a site map. This is a static page with a link from your main page. Always give your links a good name, not just click here!!
Example:

[Site Map]
[Home Page]
[Company Info]
[Search]
….
ETC
[Product Pages]
[shopdisplaysubcat.asp?id=1]
[shopdisplayproducts.asp?id=1&subcat=1]
[shopdisplayproducts.asp?id=1&subcat=2]
etc…
[shopdisplaysubcat.asp?id=2]
[shopdisplaysubcat.asp?id=3]


If you have, access to you server logs check them around the 10th of the month look for googlebot. This will give you some idea, which pages google sees.

Check out http://www.webmasterworld.com/ for more info on some of this.


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pymalion
VP-CART New User

USA
80 Posts

Posted - March 11 2003 :  10:50:49  Show Profile  Visit pymalion's Homepage  Reply with Quote
Thanks for the info.

I frequent webmasterworld, and that was where I found the info on ?'s. The biggest problem I have is the webspace. Having over 40K static pages takes up alot of disk space. Although, most of them are now showing up in google!!! WOO-HOO!!! Paying for the extra disk space may just be what I have to do, to continue receiving the google/yahoo referrals. Traffic is good! Especially, considering I waited sense the last deep crawl back in January, which took 9 days to crawl the site. The pages "just" started showing up on Friday. Exciting stuff... :)

Stephen Page
[email protected]
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