Re: [CF-Dev] Re: [ cf-dev ] OT - Search Engine Optimisation

["Taz" <chris@cfmaster.co.uk>]

I've hear this sort of thing all the time, people's reserves about dynamic
sites (specifically CF for some reason) and their search engine ranking.


Run any search on any of the major search engines and you will almost
certainly get a large number of hits for dynamic sites such as Ebay, Amazon,
and Funjunkie. (No really... we've got brilliant search engine rankings for
hundreds of search terms. It staggers the imagination.)

Google has no problem with URL query strings, and nor do most other search
engines. Just look at the query string in an ebay page to see how messy a
URL can be and still get indexed. However, you're more likely to get a
better ranking on a specific term if that term appears in the domain name,
path or filename of the page. (Add to that the title, content and good use
of descriptive link text and alt tags for images.)

Your best comprimise might be to start using search engine friendly URL
strings, which use a forward slash as delimiter for attributes and values,
instead of & and =.

e.g.

non SEF:

index.cfm?AnAttribute=456&AnotherAttribute=643

SEF:

index.cfm/AnAttribute/456/AnotherAttribute/643

The only problem with this is that the server has to be set up to run it,
otherwise it'll also try to interpret the '/' as a directory. You'll also
have to add a bit of code that takes the query string and slices it back up
into attribute and value pairs, then puts them into the URL scope.

The next step up is to give the search engine something to chew on. It's all
very well having attributes and values in the query string, but if they're
not useful as search terms it's a waste of time. So you could pass some
redundant values. Your link could be made up of the attributes that you need
to display the right content, and the category and title of that page. This
should have some useful value for searching:

index.cfm/AnAttribute/456/AnotherAttribute/643/Fruit_and_vegetables/Cabbages

Your application uses the first two attributes:

attributes.AnAttribute = 456
attributes.AnotherAttribute = 643

and ignores the final one:

attributes.Fruit_and_vegetables = Cabbages

which just provides the relevant keywords for good indexing.
I'll stop there because I ought to be doing some work.
Taz