> http://www.somesite.com/store.php?SCREEN=department&sid=TSirhCwzKQX1KnSN&dep
> artment=1
>
> Does anyone have any hints/tips/opinions/experience on how the search
> engines are indexing this type of FreeTrade url. I keep running across
> tidbits about potential pitfalls of such a url - some search engines are
> rumored to only index this part of the above:
> http://www.somesite.com/store.php
I believe many search engines won't follow links with GET variables,
or maybe they follow them but chop off the variables, in which case
only the front page will be indexed.
Empirically, I've found a few pages on google.com with GET variables,
but not many. My vague memories of using search engines imply there
are few.
> I am considering converting an entire site to the FT schema but would be
> interested to hear your opinions on this.
I have heard this, but never looked into it myself. It would be easy
to change Freetrade so that the URL looked more like:
http://www.somesite.com/store.php/department?sid=asdflkjsdf&department=1
And that would help a little. I believe this would just take a change
to index.php3 to get SCREEN from the URL, and a change to the
ScreenURL function to generate these sorts of links.
But even that isn't really enough, because search engines will still
not index the individual departments and items. You would ideally
want something like:
http://www.somesite.com/store.php/department/department1?sid=adsfxkljasfd
However, it would require lots of changes to Freetrade, from what I've
noticed from the code, since a lot of URL's seem to be constructed by
concatenating "&var=value" onto the end of a URL. Otherwise, the only
time when there's any real need to use GET variables is when it's from
a submitted form (though of course it requires some extra coding).
--
Ian Bicking
4869 N. Talman Ave., Chicago, IL 60625
(773) 275-7241
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.colorstudy.com/ianb
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