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]>
