removing '?' from urls for spiders

[Anon]

Hi
I read this article:
http://www.netmechanic.com/news/vol4/promo_no3.htm

which talked about removing Query Strings From Dynamic URL's. The article said there were solutions in Cold Fusion and ASP. Is there an approach in php?
e.g. in a URL like this:
http://www.save-on-software.com/linkman/showlinks.php?cat_id=1&cat_desc=Software

How can I create a non-dynamic link for a site map so that it can be spidered?

Tony.

[mrjam]

Not tested, but...

$x = explode("?","http://www.save-on-software.com/linkman/showlinks.php?cat_id=1&cat_desc==Software");
echo $x[0];

...should work... Or did I miss what you were searching for completely?

// Thomasson

[Anon]

Check out Tim Perdue's excellent article on building pages with search engines in mind:

http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20000526.php3

His system only works on Linux machines where php is installed as an Apache module. CGI version of PHP won't work.

If you need some webhost recommendations, let me know.