[ic] Search engines summary?

Jonathan Clark interchange-users@icdevgroup.org
Tue Sep 24 11:28:01 2002


> I got all my rewrite rules working and have launched my new site. My old
> site has been around for years and shows up reasonably well in the
> search engines.
>
> I'm concerned about how my search engine ranking will change now that my
> site uses the rewrite rules and is IC based. I've seen various posts on
> this topic including some treatment of this issue in the 4.9 versions.
>
> Can anyone post a summary, hopefully from experience, about the most
> important ways to make a 4.8(6 in my case)/foundation store rank well?
> Info on rewrite rules, meta tags, and anything else would be helpful.

some search engines:

  1 don't follow pages with cgi-bin in the url
  2 don't follow pages with cgi args, eg. ?id=
  3 don't look at meta tags (eg. google), but some do.
  4 look at how many times your site is linked to from the rest of the
world.
  5 make you pay through the nose just for them to consider your site.

1 can be sorted with the rewrite, or even just a renamed or aliased cgi-bin.
There was a recent discussion on 2. There was a discussion a while back
about adding an editable meta header section to the ic templating system
allowing per page meta tags for 3.

On a more general note, search engines like page titles, and content. Make
sure these are relevant or you will never achieve good rankings.

However, when you are battling for the top spot in aggressively promoted
keywords then you may have to employ additional techniques.

good luck,

Jonathan
Webmaint.