Dreamweaver - from static html to dynamic site

Author

from static html to dynamic site - search engines

robbie

2005-09-29, 6:19 pm

My site ranks on googles first page for a lot of terms and that's great.
Except now our site is db driven and instead of productname.htm everything
is product.asp?isbn=number

I edited all the html pages so that they link to the product page for that
item or a search page with many of the same item. I'm not going to take down
my old html pages since they link to the new site anyways, doesn't seem like
there's any harm in leaving them.

What I'm wondering is how long do you think until my dynamic pages show up
on google instead of the html.

Michael Fesser

2005-09-29, 6:19 pm

..oO(robbie)

>My site ranks on googles first page for a lot of terms and that's great.
>Except now our site is db driven and instead of productname.htm everything
>is product.asp?isbn=number

That's bad. Even with a dynamic site there's no reason to have such ugly
URLs. With URL rewriting you can keep the old URLs or at least some more
readable URLs like /product/number. Of course it would have been better
to think about such things before publishing the site.

Cool URIs don't change
http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI.html

URL design should be done _before_ the web design.

Micha

darrel

2005-09-29, 6:19 pm

> What I'm wondering is how long do you think until my dynamic pages show up
> on google instead of the html.

Your guess is as good as ours. Google is an ever-changing mystery.

FYI, if URL rewriting would be better than keeping the static pages around.
The benefit is that then none of your URLs would change at all from the
original ones. Your ISP should offer ISAPIrewrite, or, if it's your own
server, you can download a free version of ISAPIrewrite and install it
yourself:

http://www.isapirewrite.com/

-Darrel

robbie

2005-09-30, 6:21 pm

Well personally, I dont think my url format is that bad. If someone catches
onto the isbn=number part they would be able to find any product they wanted
if they so happend to manually punch in the url themselves.... where as on
amazon urls are even more crazy

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...numbersometimes
aproductnumber/anotherunrelevantnumber?v=glance
plus their url can be longer if there is a referral id.

The site is only a week old so it may not be too late to change it is
possible to product/number that would be nice.

I'll look into that isapi stuff it looks interesting but it sounds too
complicated for me. I guess I wont know until I try.

How would it differ from their LinkFreeze stuff? anyone have that or both?

Murray *TMM*

2005-09-30, 6:21 pm

> Well personally, I dont think my url format is that bad.

Perhaps not, but I think Micha's point was that it's bad for the spiders.

--
Murray --- ICQ 71997575
Team Macromedia Volunteer for Dreamweaver
(If you *MUST* email me, don't LAUGH when you do so!)
==================
http://www.dreamweavermx-templates.com - Template Triage!
http://www.projectseven.com/go - DW FAQs, Tutorials & Resources
http://www.dwfaq.com - DW FAQs, Tutorials & Resources
http://www.macromedia.com/support/search/ - Macromedia (MM) Technotes
==================

"robbie" <robbieb@nospamXXXXXXXXXX> wrote in message
news:dhjujh$5cu$1@forums.macromedia.com...
> Well personally, I dont think my url format is that bad. If someone
> catches onto the isbn=number part they would be able to find any product
> they wanted if they so happend to manually punch in the url themselves....
> where as on amazon urls are even more crazy
>
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...numbersometimes
> aproductnumber/anotherunrelevantnumber?v=glance
> plus their url can be longer if there is a referral id.
>
> The site is only a week old so it may not be too late to change it is
> possible to product/number that would be nice.
>
> I'll look into that isapi stuff it looks interesting but it sounds too
> complicated for me. I guess I wont know until I try.
>
> How would it differ from their LinkFreeze stuff? anyone have that or both?
>
>

Michael Fesser

2005-09-30, 6:21 pm

..oO(Murray *TMM*)

>
>Perhaps not, but I think Micha's point was that it's bad for the spiders.

Not really (I don't think current spiders ignore query strings anymore),
it's more for readability. Using a query string to get a particular
resource always means to use variable names:

http://example.com/?foo=this&bar=that

Usually the names 'foo' and 'bar' are of no real interest to the user,
the shorter

http://example.com/this/that

IMHO looks much better and is, well, shorter. ;)

But after all there's at least one situation where the first version
_will_ cause problems. Compare these two URLs to download a particular
file:

http://example.com/download.php?file=filename
http://example.com/download/filename

The first will cause some old browsers to save the downloaded file with
the name of the script instead of its real name. The second will always
work.

Micha

robbie

2005-09-30, 6:21 pm

Yeah, I agree product/itemnumber would be much better then my current thing.
Now that I research this more, I remember hearing about isapi rewrite when I
was trying to get googletap to work on windows hosting. My webhost didn't
support it but I have my own server now.

How is this going to be different then LinkFreeze? Its definitely cheaper.

Michael Fesser

2005-09-30, 6:21 pm

..oO(robbie)

>Yeah, I agree product/itemnumber would be much better then my current thing.
>Now that I research this more, I remember hearing about isapi rewrite when I
>was trying to get googletap to work on windows hosting. My webhost didn't
>support it but I have my own server now.
>
>How is this going to be different then LinkFreeze? Its definitely cheaper.

ISAPI_Rewrite will most likely be harder to use if you have no
experience with it, but it's much more powerful and flexible, because
it's based on regular expressions. You can do all kinds of URL
manipulations you can think of.

It's quite similar to the very famous (and free) Apache module
mod_rewrite, which is really a beast. A damn powerful beast. But if you
know how to use it you don't want to miss it anymore.

Micha