RE: SEO and servlets
Those are both very good points I hadn't considered - thank you! :) Neal -Original Message- From: Craig R. McClanahan [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, December 06, 2002 6:35 PM To: Tomcat Users List Subject: RE: SEO and servlets On Fri, 6 Dec 2002, Cox, Charlie wrote: Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 08:13:20 -0500 From: Cox, Charlie [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Tomcat Users List [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: 'Tomcat Users List' [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: SEO and servlets I do a silimar thing where all my content is in a database as XML, so that the users can update their content when *they* need to(not when I get around to it). Then the html is created using xsl when requested. The way that I set this up is that I map a directory to each servlet (or sometimes multiple directories to a servlet for different functionality for another set of pages) and then use real page names. These appear to be static html pages. This allows the pagename to be a prarm for the servlet. A popular technique for supporting this sort of thing is to use path mapping with the wild card pattern. Consider a servlet that is mapped to /display/*, and a URL like this: http://www.mycompany.com/myapp/display/foo.html The /foo.html part of that URL shows up in your servlet as the extra path info, and can be used to go look up the database information and perform the translation. Your application understands that you're executing a servlet that is creating (potentially) dynamic content. Yet, to users and search engines, this appears to be a URL of a static HTML page in the display subdirectory. Is it live or is it Memorex? was a marketing slogan for a brand of audiotapes a few years ago. Only your app server knows for sure ... :-) I also do not have many forms(nor do I use struts,etc) so that is not a problem for me. This kind of dynamic content (where it changes occasionally but not often) is reasonable to index with a search engine. One thing you'll want to make sure you do is include a Date header (containing some representation of when the underlying database was last updated) in the response -- that way, browsers can also cache the rendered page and only update when the underlying data changes. You'll also want to implement the getLastModified() method in your servlet for this to work. Charlie Craig -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: SEO and servlets
Craig, Thanks for the reponse. I know what you're saying that you wouldn't want to submit most web app pages, presuming that most of it is form data ... but in this case I have a bit of content that was placed into dynamic pages because (a) There is a common naivgation framework that is essentially included, (b) in the case of the main page there is some 'weekly specials' data that gets inserted into the content. The framework I developed presumes XsLT for the template rather than jsp, which means that I must use a servlet (in this case with my own extension), and thus the concern. So that's why I was wondering. I knew about the other issues such s have params beyond the question mark (they won't be picked up)... again another reason to use a servlet wherein *.abc would invoke the abc serlet and * could introspectively obtained as a param .. I thought that might be a way around it ... but I'm beginning to think perhaps not. :( Anyway, thanks for your thoughts. -Original Message- From: Craig R. McClanahan [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, December 05, 2002 6:55 PM To: Tomcat Users List Subject: Re: SEO and servlets On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, neal wrote: Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 22:06:53 -0800 From: neal [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Tomcat Users List [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Tomcat Users List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: SEO and servlets I was reading on Google the other day that it supports many of the common file types including JSP ... but this led me to wonder if they index servlets without file extensions, or how about common frameworks such as Struts with the DO extensions. Does anyone know how these file types index with Google and other major engines? Different search engines follow different policies -- you'd have to ask them how their spiders are programmed. Most of them, probably, omit at least some of the following types of URLs: * URLs protected by an authentication constraint * URLs matching patterns listed in the deny list of your robots.txt file * URLs that have query parameters in them * URLs that have no-cache headers in the returned content Personally, I think it's somewhere between misleading and silly to index pages from a web *applications* (as opposed to web sites) based on an MVC framework (like Struts). Why? Because the URL that a search engine spider would submit doesn't necessarily have *anything* to do with the output that gets rendered. Consider a very common case where you have a form submit that goes to a URL ending in .../saveCustomer.do in a Struts app. If you've made any errors that get caught by the validation rules, the original input form is redisplayed. On the other hand, if you did everything correctly, the next page in your app's user interaction is displayed (probably a menu or something). But the URL is the same! Which kind of output should a search engine index? Web applications != Web sites Thanks. Neal Craig -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: SEO and servlets
I do a silimar thing where all my content is in a database as XML, so that the users can update their content when *they* need to(not when I get around to it). Then the html is created using xsl when requested. The way that I set this up is that I map a directory to each servlet (or sometimes multiple directories to a servlet for different functionality for another set of pages) and then use real page names. These appear to be static html pages. This allows the pagename to be a prarm for the servlet. I also do not have many forms(nor do I use struts,etc) so that is not a problem for me. Charlie -Original Message- From: neal [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, December 06, 2002 3:49 AM To: Tomcat Users List Subject: RE: SEO and servlets Craig, Thanks for the reponse. I know what you're saying that you wouldn't want to submit most web app pages, presuming that most of it is form data ... but in this case I have a bit of content that was placed into dynamic pages because (a) There is a common naivgation framework that is essentially included, (b) in the case of the main page there is some 'weekly specials' data that gets inserted into the content. The framework I developed presumes XsLT for the template rather than jsp, which means that I must use a servlet (in this case with my own extension), and thus the concern. So that's why I was wondering. I knew about the other issues such s have params beyond the question mark (they won't be picked up)... again another reason to use a servlet wherein *.abc would invoke the abc serlet and * could introspectively obtained as a param .. I thought that might be a way around it ... but I'm beginning to think perhaps not. :( Anyway, thanks for your thoughts. -Original Message- From: Craig R. McClanahan [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, December 05, 2002 6:55 PM To: Tomcat Users List Subject: Re: SEO and servlets On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, neal wrote: Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 22:06:53 -0800 From: neal [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Tomcat Users List [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Tomcat Users List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: SEO and servlets I was reading on Google the other day that it supports many of the common file types including JSP ... but this led me to wonder if they index servlets without file extensions, or how about common frameworks such as Struts with the DO extensions. Does anyone know how these file types index with Google and other major engines? Different search engines follow different policies -- you'd have to ask them how their spiders are programmed. Most of them, probably, omit at least some of the following types of URLs: * URLs protected by an authentication constraint * URLs matching patterns listed in the deny list of your robots.txt file * URLs that have query parameters in them * URLs that have no-cache headers in the returned content Personally, I think it's somewhere between misleading and silly to index pages from a web *applications* (as opposed to web sites) based on an MVC framework (like Struts). Why? Because the URL that a search engine spider would submit doesn't necessarily have *anything* to do with the output that gets rendered. Consider a very common case where you have a form submit that goes to a URL ending in .../saveCustomer.do in a Struts app. If you've made any errors that get caught by the validation rules, the original input form is redisplayed. On the other hand, if you did everything correctly, the next page in your app's user interaction is displayed (probably a menu or something). But the URL is the same! Which kind of output should a search engine index? Web applications != Web sites Thanks. Neal Craig -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: SEO and servlets
On Fri, 6 Dec 2002, Cox, Charlie wrote: Date: Fri, 6 Dec 2002 08:13:20 -0500 From: Cox, Charlie [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Tomcat Users List [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: 'Tomcat Users List' [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: SEO and servlets I do a silimar thing where all my content is in a database as XML, so that the users can update their content when *they* need to(not when I get around to it). Then the html is created using xsl when requested. The way that I set this up is that I map a directory to each servlet (or sometimes multiple directories to a servlet for different functionality for another set of pages) and then use real page names. These appear to be static html pages. This allows the pagename to be a prarm for the servlet. A popular technique for supporting this sort of thing is to use path mapping with the wild card pattern. Consider a servlet that is mapped to /display/*, and a URL like this: http://www.mycompany.com/myapp/display/foo.html The /foo.html part of that URL shows up in your servlet as the extra path info, and can be used to go look up the database information and perform the translation. Your application understands that you're executing a servlet that is creating (potentially) dynamic content. Yet, to users and search engines, this appears to be a URL of a static HTML page in the display subdirectory. Is it live or is it Memorex? was a marketing slogan for a brand of audiotapes a few years ago. Only your app server knows for sure ... :-) I also do not have many forms(nor do I use struts,etc) so that is not a problem for me. This kind of dynamic content (where it changes occasionally but not often) is reasonable to index with a search engine. One thing you'll want to make sure you do is include a Date header (containing some representation of when the underlying database was last updated) in the response -- that way, browsers can also cache the rendered page and only update when the underlying data changes. You'll also want to implement the getLastModified() method in your servlet for this to work. Charlie Craig -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: SEO and servlets
On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, neal wrote: Date: Wed, 4 Dec 2002 22:06:53 -0800 From: neal [EMAIL PROTECTED] Reply-To: Tomcat Users List [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: Tomcat Users List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: SEO and servlets I was reading on Google the other day that it supports many of the common file types including JSP ... but this led me to wonder if they index servlets without file extensions, or how about common frameworks such as Struts with the DO extensions. Does anyone know how these file types index with Google and other major engines? Different search engines follow different policies -- you'd have to ask them how their spiders are programmed. Most of them, probably, omit at least some of the following types of URLs: * URLs protected by an authentication constraint * URLs matching patterns listed in the deny list of your robots.txt file * URLs that have query parameters in them * URLs that have no-cache headers in the returned content Personally, I think it's somewhere between misleading and silly to index pages from a web *applications* (as opposed to web sites) based on an MVC framework (like Struts). Why? Because the URL that a search engine spider would submit doesn't necessarily have *anything* to do with the output that gets rendered. Consider a very common case where you have a form submit that goes to a URL ending in .../saveCustomer.do in a Struts app. If you've made any errors that get caught by the validation rules, the original input form is redisplayed. On the other hand, if you did everything correctly, the next page in your app's user interaction is displayed (probably a menu or something). But the URL is the same! Which kind of output should a search engine index? Web applications != Web sites Thanks. Neal Craig -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
SEO and servlets
I was reading on Google the other day that it supports many of the common file types including JSP ... but this led me to wonder if they index servlets without file extensions, or how about common frameworks such as Struts with the DO extensions. Does anyone know how these file types index with Google and other major engines? Thanks. Neal -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
