Dynamic sites and search engines

rschmitt

Hi there,

I have a little problem that I'd like to hear your comments on!

I have developed a database-driven e-commerce site (www.apollo-intermedia.de) that makes extensive use of question marks and ampersands in the URL. This, of course, is no good for the search engines, that can't access these URLs.

I have read the article on PHPBuilder concerning this, but that won't help me now seeing as though the site's complete!

Does anyone have an idea of how to get around this?

Thanks
Robbie

Anon

There is a simpler way of creating search engine friendly URLs that doesn't require you to mess around with Apache configs or anything like that. I describe it here:

http://www.sitepointforums.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=15798

It still requires a few modifications to the code - I suggest the easiest way would be to write a short piece of "URL parsing" code to go at the top of every file. This code would break up a URL pattern such as this one:

http://mysite.com/script.php/section_5/article_1/

And parse it to fill any variables mentioned in the URL - the above example would become:

$section = 5;
$article = 1;

I'm sure this could be achieved using an explode funciton or two plus variable variables to set the variable names.

Cheers,

Simon