Should I convert ? and = to slashes

[countdrak]

We have a dynamic website with a page for our product lines. I pull everything from a database and the layout remains the same. So suppose I have a page called productline.cfm ( The site is developed in coldfusion)

Now say if I have three products that we sell say phones,phone accessories and car acessories. My links look like this

http://www.mydomain.com/productline.cfm?IDS=1,2,3

when the use clicks the link "Phones"

When the user clicks "Phone Accessories" my link looks like

http://www.mydomain.com/productline.cfm?IDS=5,6,7

and so on.

Now google or yahoo cant really display these dynamic pages,it seems like they dont cache the above links. They only cache

http://www.mydomain.com

and that is the problem. I was asked to convert the above links to

http://www.mydomain.com/productline.cfm/IDS/5/6/7

http://www.mydomain.com/productline.cfm/IDS=1/2/3

so to convert all the ampersands and equal to signs to slashes and then our pages would be cached correctly? Does anyone think that will help? This will require a huge database conversion, coz everything on the website is dynamic even the menu and the links. Please advice. Thanks.

 

[Foamcow]

Depending on your server platform you should be able to rewrite the URLs dynamically to avoid this problem.

Although you may have to alter links within the site itself to use the new format you shouldn't have to change all your product records.

Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web design and ranting
Target Marketing Communications - Advertising, Direct Marketing and Public Relations
I wonder what possesses people to make those animated gifs. Do you just get up in the morning and think, "You know what web design r

 

[countdrak]

Thanks for the reply. But do you think it will help my rankings?

 

[ChrisHirst]

it will make absolutely no difference to your ranking whatsoever.

And it may or may not improve the "crawlability" of the site.

Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Woo Hoo! the cobblers kids get new shoes.
People Counting Systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[countdrak]

Thanks chris...one last question can anyone tell me which search engines CARE about these search engine friendly urls??
Thanks again.

 

[ChrisHirst]

none really,

provided you keep below 3 parameter names, avoid session IDs, don't have long parameter values (over 15 chars approx) and avoid the killer combination of using ID in the name with a value longer than 8 - 10 chars, querystrings are not a major issue.


Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Woo Hoo! the cobblers kids get new shoes.
People Counting Systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[Foamcow]

I can report that I was using a single parameter in a query string, just ID with 1-4 characters and things were being indexed fine.

But when I added some rewrite rules to my htaccess file things got much better. More pages got indexed.

Now I don't know if this was coincidence or not, but it's what happened.

As Chris said, it won't make a difference to ranking, but imho it *may* help if crawlers are getting a bit stuck.

Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web design and ranting
Target Marketing Communications - Advertising, Direct Marketing and Public Relations
I wonder what possesses people to make those animated gifs. Do you just get up in the morning and think, "You know what web design r

 

[countdrak]

Thanks for all the help guys. I am trying the google sitemap tool, hopefully google crawls all my pages atleast if nothing else. *Keeping my fingers crossed*

 

[musalpay]

Does anyone know how to convert

http://www.tek-tips.com/article.asp?id=1596

to

http://www.tek-tips.com/article/1596

?

Thanks

 

[ChrisHirst]

I'll assume IIS, Take a look at ISAP rewrite

There is also an evolved code article

and I'm currently testing a purely ASP solution using the 404 page.


Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Woo Hoo! the cobblers kids get new shoes.
People Counting Systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[Foamcow]

I was going to suggest using the 404 page to read the querystring and use conditionals to determine where to redirect... then if all else fails display the "oops 404" message

But I guess that's what your'e doing Chris

I do something similar on one of the few ASP sites I work on. Although it is simply redirecting requests for pages that no longer exist. Wouldn't be hard to convert it though I guess.

 Select Case SomeDir
	Case "MEDIAINFO.ASP"
		Response.Redirect("newsArchive.asp")
	Case "PRN-AWARDS.ASP"
		Response.Redirect("awards.asp")
	Case "DEFAULT-BEAR.ASP"	
		Response.Redirect("index.asp")
	Case "DEFAULT.ASP"	
		Response.Redirect("index.asp")
  Case Else

For "proper" work ( ;-) ) I use Apache, htaccess and modrewrite.

Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web design and ranting
Target Marketing Communications - Advertising, Direct Marketing and Public Relations
I wonder what possesses people to make those animated gifs. Do you just get up in the morning and think, "You know what web design r

 

[ChrisHirst]

be careful when using response.redirect because it sends a 302 response to the UA so it won't update the SEs index with the new location.





Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Woo Hoo! the cobblers kids get new shoes.
People Counting Systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[Foamcow]

Google seems to have worked out that those pages no longer exist. I don't think they have appeared in the SERPS for a long while.
I basically only did that when I took over the running of the site and did a redesign.

Using my code example, is there a "better" way to redirect using ASP? I only know pretty basic ASP to be honest.

Foamcow Heavy Industries - Web design and ranting
Target Marketing Communications - Advertising, Direct Marketing and Public Relations
I wonder what possesses people to make those animated gifs. Do you just get up in the morning and think, "You know what web design r

 

[ChrisHirst]

not necessarily better, but to avoid any Google 302 problems I'd use a 301
So;

dim TargUri

 Select Case SomeDir
    Case "MEDIAINFO.ASP"
        TargUri = "newsArchive.asp"
    Case "PRN-AWARDS.ASP"
        TargUri = "awards.asp"
    Case "DEFAULT-BEAR.ASP"    
        TargUri = "index.asp"
    Case "DEFAULT.ASP"    
        TargUri = "index.asp"
  Case Else
 end select 
if TargUri <> "" then
   response.status = "301 Moved Permanently"
   response.addheader "Location",TargUri
end if

Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Woo Hoo! the cobblers kids get new shoes.
People Counting Systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[dflanagan]

Chris,
Is the 3 parameters limit a RULE when sumbitting to a search engine, or having them crawl the site? We have a HUGE database of products, and the site currently uses a cookie to narrow your results. I KNOW that is stopping indexing, so I am trying to develope a browse-able method to get to the items. I read your post above and became worried.

My current plan will ulitmately produce a url that looks like this:

http://www.mysite.com/parts.asp?typ...or&mfg=ace&make=chevy&model=camaro&year=72-93

There may even be one more parameter in the url. Does this mean I am wasting my time? I am trying to make it actually useable for a shopper while giving the site the ability to be crawled successfully.

I could knock that down a bunch, but the result would be a page with a LOT of links on it. For example you could select type, category, and mfg, and then the rsult would be a page with ALL makes, models and years...

I would rather do it the way I am now, but if it will not work for the crawlers, then there is no sense...

What do you think?

Thanks!
Dave

 

[dflanagan]

Ignore that "amp;" stuff in the URL above. That must have been added when I posted

 

[ChrisHirst]

It's not a "rule" as such because there really aren't any, but you will find it difficult to get a site fully indexed with those URLs. You will need an awful lot of link pop to counteract that.

But how about looking at another way. One of the most important things for any kind of marketing is to get your site talked about. How is anyone going to tell someone else how to find any spare part.

Telephone conversation;

"It's at

http://www dot

blah dot com question mark type equals something ampersand category equals"

"no that's ampersand"

"It's a squiggly thing"

" No, use shift and seven"

" either shift key"

" No, Shift is the one with an arrow pointing upwards"

etc etc You probably get the idea by now.

So SEs aside, those URIs are decidely user unfriendly

(More to follow)

Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Woo Hoo! the cobblers kids get new shoes.
People Counting Systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[dflanagan]

Hahahaha!

Yes, we advertise heavily elsewhere, and our site is very successful. What we are not getting is the FREE advertising that can be found with this SEO stuff. I am SURE it would be a LOT more traffic if I can get this done right.

Dave

 

[ChrisHunt]

But do you really want SEs to list URLs like the one you gave us? - which is itself essentially a page of search results. I think you should make sure that each part has a page of its own, with a url like mysite.com/parts.asp?partno=1234 . Make sure that spiders can crawl their way to each of those pages, and that the pages have all the right keywords on them - car makes & models, manufacturers part names/numbers, etc.

That way you'll pick up people typing in specific terms like "ford left handed grommet washer 12345A", rather than just targetting "ford parts".

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd

 

[xtendscott]

if TargUri <> "" then
response.status = "301 Moved Permanently"
response.addheader "Location",TargUri
end if"

Not sure why you are doing a redirect. I don't know what ASP does, but with ColdFusion I have been using a 404 page to Capture the variables in the url "mode/var1/var2/var3" and then depending on the "mode" in a case, that is where I decide what to do and which page to "Include" for actual processing of the page.

<case "mode">
loop through URL to get vars

myvar=var1
thisvar=var2
anothervar=var3

include(mypage.cfm)

Not actual cf code but you can get my point

mypage then processes the page based on page variables. It isn't being redirected though. Every page is "200 OK" in the response header.


xtendscott
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