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url friendly , what does it means???

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 11:07 am
by yacahuma
I dont know if I am asking this correctly but here it goes. I was looking at a couple of program for a web front store. Some of them say that is genereates a url friendly pages!! so it can be found by web crawlers. What does this mean?

what that has to do with a dynamically generated site.


Thank you

Re: url friendly , what does it means???

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 11:19 am
by John Cartwright
Clean url's usually mean to use of mod_rewrite to "clean up" the urls, i.e.

index.php?controller=foo&action=bar&id=5&doo=da

would become

/foo/bar/5/da
or
/controller/foo/action/bar/id/5/doo/da

Most major search engines are capable of crawling query strings, so there is really no benefit (from a SEO point of view) to use "clean urls". Those sites are wrong about that point.

I like to keep clean url's because the url is considered a part of the interface, so if it is easy for a user to understand the url structure they would be able to type in urls no problem.

Re: url friendly , what does it means???

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 12:23 pm
by yacahuma
but if my site is dynamic, how can a search engine find it

for example , let say i have a page like

sellthisproduct.php?product_id=5

There is no way a search engine can go there and find out that I am selling my ps3(product_id =5) so that if someone is searching in google for ps3 , my page will appear.


what are the options? generate static htmls ?

Re: url friendly , what does it means???

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 12:47 pm
by matthijs
Search engines can find "dynamic" pages perfectly well. It doesn't matter if your page is at /page.html, page.php, page.asp, index.php?pageid=5, etc etc

Re: url friendly , what does it means???

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 1:08 pm
by John Cartwright
My last point addresses your concerns exactly. Search engines CAN READ the query string fine.

Re: url friendly , what does it means???

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 1:41 pm
by yacahuma
i am sorry , let me rephrase the question

i have a page home.php with a text field and a search button. You type Tom Cruise, because you want to find all tom cruise movies. A person knows to do that. But a search engine cant(right). So I could have 10 tom cruise movies for sale but there is no way for the search engine to find it.

The only way is for my program to generate an index of all my movies , have a link to the index in my home.php and wait for the crawler to find the link, follow it, get to the index page .

I am guessing then index will look something like
a href=detail.php?p=1> MOvie 1
a href=detail.php?p=2> MOvie 2
etc
etc

But if I have thousands?? Does the same rule applies?

Le me know if I am wrong here

Thanks

Re: url friendly , what does it means???

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 2:02 pm
by lafever
I don't think you're understanding quite well.

If there is a link to it on your site, the search engine will find it.

Search engines 'crawl' your site basically going through your source and checking every link available within each page (easier to understand). So if you have a link that says Movies and those Tom Cruise movies are viewable then they will be found by the search engine unless you can only find movies by searching (Don't see why any site trying to make sales would do that though)

Re: url friendly , what does it means???

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 4:11 pm
by yacahuma
thanks i get it(i think).

so basically if i have a classified site

the home page have 2 links

cars
boats

when you go to cars, you get a search form and nothing else

then the crawler will stop there and no ads will be indexed(in theory)

or

will the crawler try to submit the search form to move to the next page??(this is the case where the search without parameters will start listing all cars)

Re: url friendly , what does it means???

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 5:16 pm
by matthijs
No, the crawler will not submit the form. You will have to provide a real link somewhere to a product page.

Re: url friendly , what does it means???

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 6:30 pm
by s.dot
Keywords in URLs are nice though. As long as you have an id somewhere (or a good request mapper/router thingy), it is fairly easy to do.

For example:

showmovie.php?movieid=7 could easily be rewritten as

movies/7/devnet_gone_wild/

A lot of people here will tell you that keywords in the URLs don't matter with search engine rankings. But, from my own personal experience and opinion it certainly helps. Especially helps click-throughs probably because the url will show up in bold on google and other big search engines.

Re: url friendly , what does it means???

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 7:31 pm
by yacahuma
ok, we are now on the same page.


So then it will make sense(????) to create a page(maybe not ment for humans) that contains all the links to your movies, or classifieds or anything else and put a link of that page inside your home page. Right?

Re: url friendly , what does it means???

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 7:33 pm
by John Cartwright
Yes, usually sites will use a Sitemap for search engines to crawl.

Re: url friendly , what does it means???

Posted: Tue Apr 29, 2008 8:48 pm
by yacahuma
I now I see the light :drunk: . I had now idea there was a protocol for the sitemaps.

Thank you.

Re: url friendly , what does it means???

Posted: Sat May 03, 2008 9:55 pm
by Jonah Bron
But remember, you must have a link to the sitemap, or the crawlbot won't know it's there. Either that, or manually submit it's url to the crawler