PHP Pages & Search Engines

[EvilAsh]

This may be the wrong forum so Mods please move the post if so!

I have a website built using a mysql database of products and a php front end. Effectively, it is a site with a handful of pages, including one page listing all the products and another that is effectively a template, dynamically populated when a product is selected using, for example, productname.php?item=1a etc

My question is, whilst there are dozens of variations of the product page but these are effectively the same page but with different, dynamic content, will search engines look at the site and take into consideration all the various products or just see the handful of pages?

Thanks as always.

 

[ggggus]

It's probably in the wrong forum, but I'll answer anyway.

The topic of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a very broad topic and is kind of black magic.

That said, your first obstacle to dynamic content is making sure the search engine spyders find their way to your content. Spyders cannot use forms, so you must have links to the content from a page such as a site map.

From my understanding, Search engines tend to be hesitant of pages with query strings...the longer the query string, the more hesitant the spyder is to crawl it... because they can get caught in loops and such from badly coded sites. If you must use the query string, keep it as short as possible. If you can use mod_rewrite or some variation there of. Example: a site I put together

http://www.FitnessRepairParts.com

has over 100,000 parts in it's database and over 1,000,000 rows in the database... but all the dynamic content looks like directories to the search engines.

Third: always keep your queries in the same order.
Although

http://foo.bar/index.php?action=this&item=1a

and

http://foo.bar/index.php?item=1a&action=this

may produce the same outcome on your website, these look like two different pages to the search engine...so it crawls both and finds identical information on them....too much identical information, and they search engine may give up on your site, or worse yet, think you are page spamming and drop your site from their database.

Hope that gives you a starting point.

***************************************
J. Jacobs

http://www.piercedmedia.com