At 12/7/2000 10:47 AM -0800, you wrote:
>> Supposedly the
>> search engines will index pages that apply this alternate linking
>> technique(unless you're using NT4 sp6). Personally, I can't
>> tell you whether
>> it helps search engine placement or not and would like to
>> know something
>> definitive.
>
>Does anybody know for sure?
Yes. They're indexed. Again I ask, why would they not be?
When you're checking results you have to understand how each search engine works.
Google, for example, (partially) rates pages by how many links there are TO the page.
Many search engines have their own criteria for what's ranked how.
What I do to test the indexing is find a string that would be unique to a page inside
the site I'm checking (not worrying about positioning in the search engines-- that's a
different matter entirely). Then just run that string in the major engines. Just the
fact that the right page is present in the results tells me it's working.
Try it out. Do remember that it takes time for search engines to find/index a site.
The older the site, the more likely it is to be fully indexed. The example site I
sent earlier (www.fusebox.com) has been up for over a year. All the pages are indexed
in all of search engines that I've tried (AOL, Lycos, Excite, AltaVista, Google,
Go.com, MSN, to name a few I can remember checking recently).
Now I'm not saying I've personally tested this on ALL search engines. But all the
ones I ever have tested have shown that indexing these pages works as expected. I
should say again that this has nothing to do with placement in the search engine
results. That still remains somewhat of a black art (to me) that has to do with META
tags, appropriate content at the top of pages, page titles, etc., etc. As long as the
URL looks normal to the indexing spider (ie. no query strings), any other placement
technique will work as it would in any other site/page. Also, some spiders DO index
URLs with query strings (I think Google does, in fact, though I can't swear to it).
If anyone has found a spider that does not (for sure) index these "search engine
friendly" URLs, I'd love to hear about it.
Cheers,
-Max
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