[Techtalk] webalizer stats and ?query strings

[Raquel Rice]

On Thu, 6 Feb 2003 23:33:55 -0500
Emma Jane Hogbin <emmajane at xtrinsic.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 06, 2003 at 08:05:04PM -0800, Raquel Rice wrote:
> > Aside from the Webalizer problems you're encountering, there are
> > other "problems" with creating dynamic web sites using "?" and
> > "&". Most of the big search engines will not index sites with an
> > "?" in the URL.  mod_rewrite really is your friend here ... and
> > it fixes the Webalizer problems.
> 
> Hm, like which search engines? If I do a search on google for
> "maytree access to foreign" (some of the keywords in my site) the
> #1 result has a
> query string:
> http://www.google.ca/search?q=maytree+access+to+foreign&btnG=Google+Search&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
> 
> gives the first result as:
> http://ftpd.maytree.com/resources_view.phtml?resid=223&catsid=25
> 
> ht://dig, another search engine I use a lot also has no problems
> with query strings.
> 
> emma

Design and Content Guidelines:
If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a '?'
character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls
dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the
parameters short and the number of them small.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

1. Reasons your site may not be included.
    * Your pages are dynamically generated. We are able to index
dynamically generated pages. However, because our web crawler can
easily overwhelm and crash sites serving dynamic content, we limit
the amount of dynamic pages we index.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html#A1

The ht://Dig system is a complete world wide web indexing and
searching system for a domain or intranet. This system is not meant
to replace the need for powerful internet-wide search systems like
Lycos, Infoseek, Google and AltaVista. Instead it is meant to cover
the search needs for a single company, campus, or even a particular
sub section of a web site.
http://www.htdig.org/

--
Raquel
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