Search Engine Friendly

Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, May 25 2003 @ 02:50 PM EDT

Search engines are wary of dynamic pages because their bots might get lost in the site or crash a server if it accesses too many pages too rapidly. SE Bots will index these types of pages though, but when they "see" an obviously dynamic URL (eg ? or cgi-bin in the url) they won't go as deep. The more parameters passed via the URL the less likely the page will be indexed.

Google is probably the most widely used SE today. If you look at their search results, their bots have no problems indexing 1 and 2 parameters and even sometimes up to 3. On a very, very, very rare occasion will you see more than that. Many of the other SE's are similar though there are a few which won't touch dynamic looking pages.

phpNuke is not SE friendly because it passes too many parameters via the URL. Other sites do the same thing but many of them rewrite the URL so it doesn't look dynamic and trick the bots. For the most part, Geeklog passes one or two parameters via the URL so yes it is more search engine friendly. If you help out just a little by installing the site index TomW and Creator wrote, I think you'll find the bots crawling all over your site without messing with rewrite tricks.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Authored by: chief123 on Sunday, May 25 2003 @ 06:21 PM EDT

Google has approximately 400 pages of PHP Nuke's site and over 800 for Geeklog. Does the Nuke site have half the content? Don't think so.

Some things I'm doing for my site to help out:

1. Making the story titles a link to the story (instead of "read more")
2. Make every story no matter how short (and most of mine won't be short) go to the full story to take advantage of the linking in #1. That's one of the reasons, in my opinion, not all pages of the GL site are in Google - each story doesn't have their own page title and links.
3. Do the site index thing the other poster mentioned.
4. Make the story titles keyword rich for the keywords I'm targeting.
5. I've also read that Google likes H1 or H2 titles on the pages. I've been trying figure out how to make this work in my theme using inline CSS (I think that's how to do it).

That's not all but it's a start.

Good luck.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, May 25 2003 @ 10:29 PM EDT

Not bad and this site doesn't even use the index. phpNuke has a lot more pages. Here's a comparison of just a few areas:

phpNuke:
stories / comments: 5834 / 22731
forum: 33674 articles
user journals: 493

Geeklog:
stories / comments: 3287 / 9820
forums: 0
user journals: 0

Comments don't usually get indexed by themselves since they are part of stories.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, May 26 2003 @ 12:56 PM EDT

Geeklog is very search engine friendly. I get about 120 hits a day JUST from search engines.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, November 15 2003 @ 03:20 AM EST

Interestingly enough, I found this page by doing a google search for

geeklog "search engine friendly"

Now here's the kicker, when I used the search feature at the top of the geeklog website for

search engine

this article was not in the results. Hhmmm....

:)

[ Reply to This | # ]