inforequest wrote:
Rick rick-at-napalmriot.com |nyphp dev/internal group use| wrote:
It's the webserver that is configured to look for default-index
files, such as index.html, and not search engines. Search engines
only attempt to access valid resources, such as the "fake" resource
you mentioned (which is quite valid and not fake at all).
--
Rick
http://www.sensual.jp
(Top-posting requires top-posting... sorry Michael.)
Yes, technically correct -- it is the webserver. BUT, to the
traditional search engine, the URL defines the resource. Every unique
URL is potentially a unique resource, and ideally they are all tested
and included in the index if unique.
As webmaster, in the eyes of the indexing search spider, you have
defined your "site" by the URL structure you used to define the
resources, and not by the content (regardless of how that content is
served... by the web server or your PHP scripts). So it becomes
important to control the URL even more carefully than the content in
many cases.
This is now changing, as we move away from URL as defining name/label
(ajax, etc). If semantic web were more advanced, it might work, but
for now, it's a good thing we only have one search engine because its
behavior is slowly becoming less standardized and more customized over
time (that was sarcasm.... a little).
-=john andrews
John:
You are correct in saying that the URL defines the resource, and the
"permanence" (I use that loosely) is quite important really. The way I
translated the question was more or less along the lines of, "say I have
this resource, which looks like a folder, is it going to look for an
index.html file?"
In the case of my answer, no. The search engines are not going to try
to guess the default resource to go to in the event of something that
appears to be a folder. They merely go where they're told, and they
follow (usually) a number of rules along the way.
Now then, as I understand it (please correct me if I'm wrong, John... as
I'm actually curious), if you move a resource to a new location, you
should provide the proper headers to do so (I believe 302 for
permanently moved, but I don't use it enough to know off the top of my
head), than most intelligent search engines are aware of the change.
Moving resources should be fairly painless, in that regard.
As far as AJAX is concerned, that's a touchy subject with me. I try to
make sure that anything I'm serving via AJAX is more-or-less personal to
the person requesting it, say a message list or friends list or
something, directly related to the person. There's always elegant
fallbacks, and what I tend to use AJAX for (I am using AJAX as a synonym
of a XMLHttpRequest object, as opposed to anything else which would be
correct) is personal data related to the user currently logged in that
isn't important to be indexed.
I intended to write a bit more, I have to deal with some other issues I
wasn't expecting so I'll leave it at that :(
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