OK, here's the scoop on indexing FreeEnergy pages. Yes, search engines
traditionally have rules for not following links with question marks in
them. So, a FreeTrade won't be indexed, except for the root document.
Google appears not to have this rule.
And, as Chuck pointed out, there is a danger to having those dynamic pages
indexed, especially if they have SID in them. You're likely to have
customers entering your store to a page with an "invalid item" message.
There is a way to work around this problem, but it will take some tweaking
of index.php. You can write your own routines to pull varaibles from the
request path and just not use a question mark. But as Paul points out,
there are many places in the 1.x codebase that send GET requests directly.
So, you'd have to find all of them. In the 2.x codebase everything is
generated from functions, so you'd only have to tweak the functions.
Ultimately, if you want to pursue this path, you'll have to get really
tricky and add code that detects when a page is being requested by a robot
and suppress sending SID in the URLs. That way you won't get endlessly
unique SIDs stored forever in the search engine.
BTW, there's another issue associated with this: running an analysis on the
Web server logs. Those same URLs really mess with the analyzers. I solved
that problem by creating a custom log and using apache_note() to send a
phony path to the custom log. It's a simple bit of code, but fairly complex
to describe in an email. I'll put it on my list of things to write about
when I have time.
Leon
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