Google had this page in its index for about 3 months but it would not spider/index the actual articles listed on the page: http://www.equitysafeteam.com/articles&type=buying Early last week I decided to put in an isapirewrite rule to make all these links to the individual articles appear to be static. BAM! All the pages are now indexed. Here is an example of how a link was before and after the change: before (not spidered/indexed): http://www.equitysafeteam.com/page.cfm?page=rtpage&link=/rtnews/rtcustom/20030501_disclosure.htm after (spidered and indexed within a week): http://www.equitysafeteam.com/news/selling/20030501_disclosure So, anyone believe they have the definitive explanation? Was it the overall length of the URL? The fact that there 2 URL params? Having "link" in the url? having a file (.htm) as one of the url params? OR (my personal belief) that google will spider a dynamic URL from a static URL, but it will not spider a dynamic URL from another dynamic URL? If someone knows, please inform. Otherwise, I'll setup some tests to try to determine the exact rule.
It could be the "link" in the URL. Or just that the parameter you are passing is pretty long. Dynamic URLs can be indexed, but there are limitations. If you want it to get done the fastest, rewriting the URLs is always the best option. If you are going to use dynamic (looking) URLs, as a rule, I never use more than two parameters, and only numeric values on those parameters, but that's just be being anal.
I am with Shawn here, but I will also say that every single Cold Fusion site I have SEo'd I have had problems getting it spidered.
I agree with Shawn two parms but I use meaningfull / real ones e.g. airportcodes and service e.g. aptcde=LGW&category=Train I also make sure the combination of parms (all of them) are actually used within the page. If not or if they fairly new these are posted on a sitemap equivalent. This is important as G, Y etc can't use your menues and try all the combinations.... (That will be the day...) M
OWG, I have recently come across a Cold Fusion website designer and know very little about these issues you speak about. I couldn't find anything specific on the DP forums. Do you have posted info regarding these "problems"? I would be very appreciative..
I use ASP and my site has never had a problem getting spidered and indexed. However, I keep my query string variable names at or under three characters and the values are mostly numeric. In fact, I have a great many top 10, top 5 and #1 rankings for several kw/p's my site targets. I think it's just how Google interprets the query string. If it's short and sweet, it seems to get indexed fine. At some point, Google seems to determine the query string is too long and won't index it.
You never know. When I was originally writing my SE Friendly URLs article back in 01 Google could not crawl urls like this: example.com/script.php/var/var The problem was that having all of that after the extension made it seem like the extension was greater than 3 characters and Google thought that was a malformed URL. At the time also I believe .info was a new extension and Google did not crawl it either. I had a short email conversation with one of their engineers and the problem got fixed. So putting a url, then a question mark and some variables, and another whole file path might be causing the same thing. It is always safest to just use friendly URLs. Friendly URLs are user friendly as well. What is easier to remember? example.com/article/foo or example.com/article.php?id=3897
I think as shawn said, it is more a matter of the multiple params in the url. It is not uncommon for G to have some issues with them. You were right to use rewrite rules to fix the issue, we have had to do the same thing with several of our sites.