google/database question

viveleroi0

I now have a site that creates dynamic shopping cart pages with products from a mysql database, using PHP.

Google would be able to search the site before when it was just html, but now that the html is gone google won't see any of the products.

Does anyone know how I can have dynamically generated pages show up in google?

P.S. we already take advantage of the froogle system.

sarahk

Google likes PHP so it will index your php pages.

Google will accept one or 2 parameters on the end of a url. Search for "sarah king coding standards" (without the quotes) and you will see a couple of my pages come up with one parameter.

In your case you could pass the id of the product. eg http://www.mysite.com/product.php?id=1223

If you want to get more fancy you could work on your .htaccess file and have urls like http://www.mysite.com/product/1223.php
where the server uses mod_rewrite to change that into the url I have suggested in the first example. The search engines see it as a separate page with a 'good' url.

For more indepth info about Search Engine Optimisation check out SEOChat.com

viveleroi0

would

/Jazz/Shop.php?category=fun

work?

Even though there are extra tags after that, the most important one is always first. Would there being more ?file-whatever variables after the one, in the same strong would that hurt google's search?

Does it have to be in the top-directory of the domain, or can it be anywhere

superwormy

This has been gone over many, many times already on this board. Please make sure you search the board.

PHP generates HTML, Google WILL NOT see any of yoru PHP code, it will see the resulting HTML, ie the same thing the user sees.

The only thing search engines tend to err away from is long GET variable strings BECAUSE often times they include sessionIDs, and search engines have no way of knowing if they are just sessionIDs and they're indexing the same page only with diff. sessionIDs 30 bazillion times.

If you want to get rid of your query strings, you should look at mod_rewrite, a 404 error method, or ForceType together with a URL parser you write in PHP. Search teh baord for more details and more code.