Topic awaiting preservation: Search Engine Friendly URL's (Page 1 of 1)

Just some quick questions:

The server i use is a windows based IIS server, obviously if you have apache on a linux server or similar you can just use mod rewrites... So how can this be done on windows servers... i've found a program http://www.isapirewrite.com/ but i dont have full control over my servers, so its really not an option ...

So..

Q1 - For a windows IIS server, is there anyway to get the same results that you get with mod_rewrite ?

Q2 - Regarding dynamic content files like PHP, im assuming the only problem occurs when you actually have a dynamic query. such as myFile.php?someValue=1 . But in the case of a php file that would just be myFile.php - there is no problem here and it will be indexed properly by search engines, even though this file could be getting data from a database and changing all the time. I guess in simple terms the question is, if you had a site that was all .php files with no question marks etc after the .php extension, then it should be indexed the same as a site that has all .html extensions.

Hopefully that is the case...

Alternatively i might just include a sitemap which basically lists all the products etc on the site so that they get indexed. However for a site with 500+ products this could get nasty T.T

Thanks in advance for any info - or suggestions!

After looking into it there seems to be quite a bit of mention that Google will 'officially' ? handle 2 variables on a dynamic link. (So one ? and one = ) will be indexed.

Has anyone heard of this or had any experience with it. Maybe some dynamic pages with variables that are actually indexed?

Well i seem to be answering alot of my own questions here, but ill post my findings anyhow as other people may find it useful.

It seems that google will still index dynamic pages, even with a few variables - Provided the site is structured correctly.

I have two sites that i am comparing, both with relatively the same size product databases and both using 2 parameters in the URL to call the products. so .php?prodType=something&option=extra

Site 1 has been up the longest (12 months+), it is nice and clean however it has no doctype, title or meta tags. (I am getting around to this!)

Site 2 has been up for roughly 6 months, nice clean code, has all verified HTML4.01 strict w3c and has proper titles, meta tags etc..

For site 1, the main URL without any variables is indexed, so products.php , however none of the individual products with the extra variables are - which is BAD!

Site 2 however has each and every page indexed, i checked this by searching for the URL, and then for a string of text featured in the actual product description. Both showed up in the search engine (google).

So, there you have it... There are a few rules however that are mentioned along the way, which unfortunately i have cannot test at the moment...

a>It's 'preferable' not to include id as any of the names of your variables. so dont do myfile.php?id=1 .
b>Don't use session id's in the url, google doesnt like this
c>Apparently google can handle 2 variables quite fine, but the more you put in the less likely it is to index it.

Anyhow that is what ive found out so far, a few more things on the SOE side i will do to help the search engine out is give individual Titles for each page - rather then an overall site page, and perhaps individual keywords for each page too. These could be generated by the php code to suit the code which would be great.

Also a php sitemap listing each and every page/product although quite cumbersom, could only help with the searching in my opinion.

Any comments/suggestions/answers are more then welcome, thanks all!