[ic] Link structure - Was: OT: Site promotion - Link Swapping

[Jonathan Clark]

interchange-users-bounces at icdevgroup.org <> wrote:

[snip]

>>
>> the second relates to the problems with google indexing paths
>> containing '='. If it has been established that google will not
>> index these paths, then would it not be worth while looking to see
>> how other commerce products address this problem. I remember that
>> oscommerce for one used paths like
>> http://whatever.com/whatever.php/varname1/varvalue1/varname2/varvalue2
>> which would correspond to ics;
>>
http://whatever.com/cgi-bin/whatever/varname1=varvalue1/varname2=varvalue2
> and this method would overcome the '=' issue.
>
>

>  Good suggestion Tom.  That thought has run across my mind when I
> spotted
> that exact situation at another site. I'm not saying google does or
> does not spider sites equally as other sites that do not use '=' in the
> URL.
> What I do know is true is that google does not spider sites they
> consider as dynamic equally as those sites they do not consider
> dynamic; all else
> about the sites being equal. Whether google considers an '=' to indicate
> dynamic or not is really hard to say especially with all the google
> changes.
> But in any case I would assume changing from '=' to '/' as you've
> suggested would require a change at the IC level and would perhaps need
> to be configurable.

> IC is extremely dynamic and capable, but this would be a bit much I
> would think.

Firstly, in our experience Google does not have a problem with '=' in the
path. We have sites with this performing well. (for example, 2 word term,
consistently top 5 out of 500,000 or so results)

Secondly, consider using ActionMap definitions to simplify your urls. This
can be a good strategy for the long run - consider if you wanted to change
your 'one-click' search to include another search feature - say sorting -
all your 'pages' change.

We do rewrite the sites from /cgi-bin/catalog/index.html to /index.html
though.

Oh, and the Page Rank of the home page is likely to affect Google's
timescale for a deep crawl.

Jonathan.

--
Jonathan Clark
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