[ic] Rewriting URLs for SEO purposes - help!

[Cameron G]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: interchange-users-bounces at icdevgroup.org 
> [mailto:interchange-users-bounces at icdevgroup.org] On Behalf 
> Of Mike Heins
> Sent: Monday, 11 April 2005 8:52 PM
> To: interchange-users at icdevgroup.org
> Subject: Re: [ic] Rewriting URLs for SEO purposes - help!
> 
> Quoting Cameron G (ritontor at icenet.com.au):
> > Hi guys,
> > 
> > I'm certain I'm not the first person in the history of IC 
> to want to 
> > do this, and right now I'm pulling my hair out in 
> frustration. Here's the deal.
> > 
> > 
> > We've all seen /scan/ URLs in IC, right?
> > 
> http://www.store.com/scan/st=db/co=yes/sf=prod_group/se=product_to_fin
> > d, or whatever it needs to be for your specific search. 
> Well, that URL 
> > is all well and fine, and it works perfectly, but it's 
> terrible for search engines.
> 
> Explain why this is terrible for search engines? As far as I 
> know, they work fine for that purpose.

It's not that they don't work in search engines, google will happily index
them, they're just not optimized. One little SEO tip is that search engines
love a keyword that has its own html page, and keyword density helps too,
meaning http://www.hammerstore.com/hammers/hammers.htm is going to rank
higher than
http://www.hammerstore.com/scan/st=db/co=yes/sf=prod_group/se=hammers. 

http://www.hammerstore.com/hammers.htm is probably just about ideal. Google
seems to really like the (htm|html) extension. 

> 
> WRT th ActionMap, there is a pretty suitable example in the 
> standard demo (from a nightly build or CVS) which does a 
> prod_group/category search. It would be easily adapted -- 
> look for ncheck_category.
> 
> Also, if you put in interchange.cfg:
> 
> 	AcceptRedirect  Yes
> 
> and in httpd.conf:
> 
> 	<LocationMatch "/[^/]*.html?$">
> 	   ErrorDocument  404 /cgi-bin/store
> 	</LocationMatch>
> 
> that will route not-found documents to Interchange with a 
> path of /product_name.html. That can then be processed by the 
> ActionMap.

Ok, that sounds cute, I will try using this in combination with the
actionmap that Jamie sent through, and see if I can't work out how to get
this all going. Thanks for the help everyone, I'm sure you'll be hearing
from me again very shortly ;) 

Regards, 

Cameron