RE: [KCFusion] directory thing

[Nate Rightmire]

They are “Search Engine Friendly” URLs.    Basically, search engine bots/crawlers don’t like dealing with dynamic pages. And typically won’t follow links that have URL parameters in the form blah.cfm?varname=varvalue&var2=var2value. This means that the search engine will recognize the fact that you have a page called blah.cfm, but won’t index all the lovely dynamic content that you have on that page.   For example, say you have an e-commerce site and you have a page on that site that lists all your products with links to another page that displays the product details. That linked page is called detail.cfm and accepts the parameters categoryID and productID. If your URL is detail.cfm?categoryID=1&productID=50, the search engines will realize you have a detail.cfm page, but all of your individual product detail pages may not get indexed. Rewriting the URL to detail.cfm/categoryid/1/productID/50 will trick the crawler into thinking the links are to multiple, static pages instead of to a single dynamic page, and thus all of your product detail pages should get indexed.   Some are better than others… I think Google will now allow one parameter after the “?”, but doesn’t like “&”. By rewriting the URL so that it doesn’t include a “?” and “&”s, you basically trick the bot/crawler into thinking that your URL is just a basic, simple URL and not something dynamic – and so it will crawl more of your site and index more of your pages.   That is a very simplified version of things, but I think it covers the basics. Of course, your mileage may vary.   Nate   From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Adaryl "Bob" Wakefield Sent: Friday, June 04, 2004 10:01 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [KCFusion] directory thing   Ok somebody will come along and give a better reason but my two cents? I want to do it cause I see professional sites like www.msnbc.com do it.   Adaryl "Bob" Wakefield Realtor www.bobwakefield.net ----- Original Message ----- From: Conner, Denise M [CC] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, June 04, 2004 9:46 AM Subject: RE: [KCFusion] directory thing   For a complete newbie...what is the purpose of this kind of a program / why would you rewrite the link?  Are there benefits to doing this? -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]On Behalf Of Nate Rightmire Sent: Friday, June 04, 2004 9:24 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: [KCFusion] directory thing We use a program called ISAPI_REWRITE. It’s pretty cheap, and allows you to customize your URLs however you like. It does require you to come up with a regular _expression_ to model your URLs on, but the documentation is pretty good and has lots of examples.   I there is also a custom tag called cf_hurlparams (or cf_hurlparamsmx, for CFMX) that does something similar. I have downloaded it, but haven’t used it at all. Let me know if you’d like the ZIP file. It is a free tag.   Nate   From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Adaryl "Bob" Wakefield Sent: Friday, June 04, 2004 8:49 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [KCFusion] directory thing   I have no idea how to google for this. Anybody know how to make your urls look like www.foo.com/id/123 insted of www.foo.com?id=123   Adaryl "Bob" Wakefield Realtor www.bobwakefield.net