NYCPHP Meetup

[Hans Zaunere]

Hello,

--- "Lynn, Michael " <MLynn at exchange.ml.com> wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> I've developed a LAMP based online catalog for a jewelry company and
> for the most part the site is great.  The problem is that nobody can
> tell it works so well due, in large part to the fact that I
> can't get the site indexed by the search engines.  I believe this is
> because it is a dynamic site and each url on the generated pages
> contain references to sub-pages using
> pagename.php?variable1=value&variable2=value

It certainly doesn't help, but I'm starting to see query strings show
up in google (OT: there's a pretty interesting site at
http://www.google-watch.org  but anyway).  Also, submit your site to
dmoz.org and you're golden (it worked for NYPHP.org anyway  :)

> I've read up on a few articles from evolt.org and searchtools
> regarding "clean" urls and I have embarked on a redevelopment of the
> site to use urls like

Speaking of google, search for:
php search friendly

I found the PromotionBase and Zend titled articles most helpful.  There
was an issue with the PATH_INFO method, however this seems to be
cleared up (supposedly).

> http://www.camelotbridal.com/new/index/rings/2 (keep in mind - I'm
> currently working on this so don't be shocked by the debug output and
> random errors)
> 
> Instead of 
> 
> http://www.camelotbridal.com/index.php?p=rings&c=3 

I just wrote something like this, and you can pass variables/values and
the search engine won't even know:
http://site/about/var_value/var2_value/somethingelse/var_value

It'll merge the vars/values to the preceeding dirname, then maps to the
real ondisk file.  I'm not sure how well this will work yet but I've
attached the source.  It's still dirty and if you have any question
don't hesitate to let me know.

> My question is this: 
> 
> Are there any tools that mimic the search engines indexing behavior
> so that I can gauge the effectiveness of my redevelopment?

Uhh, ok.  So to answer your real question, I have no idea - but I doubt
it.  For instance, I believe most spiders (ok, google's) are highly
guarded trade secrets.  While there are many public spiders out there,
I don't think you'll ever really find what the "big boys" use.

> There should be a tool that mimics
> each search engine spider (google, altavista, etc)...

If there were, google would go out of business :) but I'm sure there
are some good sites dedicated to r-engineering how the spiders crawl.

Hans




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