I was wondering if it might be better to actually remove some of my rewrites and put a normal query string, some of my links are generating thousands of rewritten pages to pass certain values to one page. If the page were: page.php?type=type&value=value instead of: page-type-value.htm Maybe google would pick up all the pages and not seem them as a zillion pages of spam? Maybe not..
Why don't you do it behind the curtains using apaches mod_rewrite for example? Redirects will make google think that the content has moved sp next time it might crawl only the redirected page (note this is just what happened to some of my sites, I might be totally wrong)
i dont agree with you . i have 12.000 pages indexed by google made with mod_rewrite and google is sending visitors to most of them
Maybe you misunderstood what I meant - IMHO mod_rewrite is the correct way to do it, especially when done with proxy flag so google or nobody else will even see the redirect.
Google maybe reluctant to index soon in this case. but it can also be taken as 'spammy' approach so avoid it.
Search engines have no idea you're using mod_rewrite. It's exactly the same as if they were real files.
No, google does not consider your pages as spam if they contain unique content and if the keyword of that page does not repeat too much. As google says, try to write content for your visitors and not for search engines. Search engines will send visitors to your website. Alternately, you may use the directory rewrite mode if still worried about getting different files: Try this tool: http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/url-rewriting Good luck!
To be more specific with my question: I have a lot of pages that are created dynamically by a database. They are all rewritten with mod-rewrite. These are not content pages, they are listings of user information from our database. One example would be student housing listings. Using mod-rewrite, every country has it's own page (Student housing in France, Student housing in China, etc). I could just have a general 'student housing' page and have the visitor select a country with a form - but- if each country does not have it's own page then it would be very difficult for someone to find 'student housing in france' for example, if I just had a general 'student housing' page. Not all country pages have results, so in the event there are no listings, it simply displays the options of posting an ad for housing, so there is no other content on that page. So in this case i have for example: student_housing2-en-FR.htm, student_housing2-en-CH.htm, etc etc .. for all the countries in the world. Then each page is multiplied by 10 because I have 10 human translations for this section. (For example: student_housing2-es-FR.htm, student_housing2-fr-FR.htm, etc). So I have a few thousand pages total in this section. I could use a session to store the country id and language so as not to have so many pages, but as I mentioned, how would anyone find the pages?
Yes, you may use a session too. Have a look over a website i build and see how the content in organized there using mod rewrite: http://www.e-articles.info Maybe it helps you get an idea...