Database driven content & search engines 1

[DeepBlerg]

Hi,

I've been reading that most search engine's won't index pages that have the ? or & seperators in their address. So a way around it is to use Apache's rewrite function but even then what will the search engine actually index if the content is held in a database anyway?

 

[rycamor]

As long as it looks like a static file or directory path to the search engine, the search engine will index it. You can even do such a thing as "

http://myserver/myfile.php/value1/value2/etc/",

and this will look like a static directory to the search engine. (Just use the $PATH_INFO variable to retrieve that string and extract your variables).

Now, there is no way to guarantee how often the search engines will update its index of your website, so if the data is changed often, the search engine results might be out of sync with your actual website.

Actually, I have heard that some newer search engines, such as Google, will index dynamic content also, I believe. I don't know any details about this, though.