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[inforequest]

Graham Spice graham-at-nuthinwerked.com |nyphp mambo list 022005| wrote:

> It has been said a number of times that all of our SEF concerns are 
> for humans, not actually search engines! Google and other search 
> engines are not having any trouble indexing Mambo websites without SEF.


Beware what you read. One good thing about search work is everyone can 
simply run a query and see for themselves what the current situation is.

What you get out of searching for yourself will be determined by how 
much effort you put into it. A "quick look" is often misleading, but 
alot of people do a "quick look", see they have dynamic URLs indexed in 
Google, and then say silly things like "dynamic URLs get indexed just fine".

Visit Google and examine the indexed pages for your own dynamic site. 
For example, if we can look at www.mamboserver.com by running a Google 
query :

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=allinurl:www.mamboserver.com

of course we see lots of dynamic pages in the index. 364 of them.

Now notice how many do not have "snippets". In other words, they appear 
in the index, but without any descriptive txt associated with them (the 
vast majority are "snippet-less").

Now 364 pages indexed should fill about 10 2/3 pages with 10 results on 
each page. But as you browse the google results set, on the 3rd page of 
results (28 mamboserver pages listed), you get this message from Google:

/In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some 
entries very similar to the 28 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included 
<http://www.google.com/search?q=allinurl:www.mamboserver.com&hl=en&lr=&filter=0>./

In other words, Google has determined that a mere 28 pages of 
www.mamboserver.com are "worthy" of display in the SERPs, and not very 
many ofthose are "worthy"of a full crawl/indexing with snippet. Now some 
may call that "getting indexed into Google". Do you?

Note: mamboserver is not a great example for demostration here, because 
they use www.mamboserver.com and mamboserver.com and many 
subdomains.mamboserver.com and also there are very very many other sites 
running 302 redirects against mamboserver.com. An 
allinurl:mamboserver.com (no www) query shows 249,000 indexed pages. 
However, many of those not actually being mamboserver.com at all but 
redirecting sites. Complications making analysis "harder".

Also notice how a query site:mamboserver.com shows 212 results (we did 
mamboserver.com and not the www server!) but the very first slot is held 
by a "redirect hijack"page. Again, very few snippets.

Bottom line:

Google does index and follow many dynamic URLs, sometimes veenones with 
massively complex get strings.
Google doe snot prefer dynamic URLs over statis URLs
Google prefers simple, word-oriented URLs over complex, cryptic URLs
Google has a very strict duplicate content filter, currently :-)

In my considered opinion every Mambo site desiring a search engine 
presence needs a search engine strategy. I don't agree with the phrase 
"search engine friendly", and I don't believe simple URL rewriting is a 
good solution for encouraging search engine inclusion. I also do not 
believe such efforts will have a positive impact on search rankings. 
You, thankfully, are able to check for yourselves.

Google queries to play with:

site:www.yousite.com.tld
allinurl:www.yousite.com.tld

and to browse all the nasty redirect hijacking that is in the SERPs take 
a look at something like
allinurl:mamboserver.com -site:mamboserver.com -site:www.mamboserver.com


-=john andrews
</animated-construction-worker> Coming Soon www.seo-fun.com  
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