> I think you'll find that any good search engine will be able to cope > just fine with that. > > The best solution, though, is to implement a permalink-like setup, and > encourage people to use permalinks when they link to your > application's content.
Thanks Dave! Unfortunately search engines don't cope with that very well. Permalinks would work great, but what exactly is a permalink for paged content? That's right, the page number! And it's something that's currently impossible to implement on appengine. I think I didn't explain the problem very well, here's an example to make it easier to understand: Let's say we want to page through blog comments, ordered by the comment_id DESC. If we have 10 comments with ids ranging from 1 to 10 and want to show 5 comments per page, we end up with two pages: Page 1: Comment 10 ... Comment 6 Next page link: /comments?next=6 Page 2: Comment 5 ... Comment 1 Page 2 will take the "next" parameter and use a query like this for fetch the comments: SELECT * FROM Comment WHERE comment_id < :id ORDER BY comment_id DESC LIMIT 5 At this point, search engines will index two pages: /comments /comments?next=6 OK, now the user adds a comment with id 11, the pages now will look like this: Page 1: Comment 11 ... Comment 7 Next page link: /comments?next=7 Page 2: Comment 6 ... Comment 2 Next page link: /comments?next=2 Page 3: Comment 1 Do you see the problem? For each comment added, search engines will pick up a new URL. Eventually there will be as many URLs in the index as there are comments (more or less, depending on how fast the users post comments and how often search engines crawl the website). In theory, those phantom URLs should be eliminated by search engines because they are orphans, that is no other pages on the website link to them. But in practice it takes awhile for search engines to remove such pages from the index. And while they wait, they can become non- orphans again (e.g. after each 5 comments posted). Does anyone have a solution for this? Thanks! Alex --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
