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 Saturday, May 17 2008 @ 07:12 AM EDT

Google Friendly Site Index

   
GeekLogVinny and I have been working on making this site more friendly to Google and the other search engines.

We are both attacking this from different angles. 

I created a simple page I call siteindex.  It is just a listing of all the stories on the site with direct links to them.  I created this because I noticed that Google almost always had a link only to index.php.  We all know that on a good site this changes all the time.  What I wanted was for google to index the stories using the actual link to the story.  It worked.  Google picked up the site index and the actual stories themselves have started showing up in googles index.  Here is the page siteindex.php that you can place on your site.  Somewhere on the front page make a link to it.  It can even be in the footer -- its meant for Google not your normal visitors.

Vinny developed a way to use apache rewrite rules and the geeklog url rewrite routine to make a search engine friendly direct link to the stories.  The hope here is that search engines that will not follow links like index.php?story=99234234 will follow these links and index the stories.  These search engines are not as quick as google to index sites and we anticipate this will take at least a month to see if it works.  Stay tuned for the results of this experiment.  You can see this in action in with the (Permanant Link) on all the stories here.

If this works as expected, Vinny and I will be releasing a package containing both hacks, that should solve most search engine woes.

TomW

 

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Google Friendly Site Index | 14 comments | Create New Account
The following comments are owned by whomever posted them. This site is not responsible for what they say.
Google Friendly Site Index
Authored by: Creator on Thursday, January 16 2003 @ 09:55 AM EST
What an excellent indexing script!!! Thanks for a great "drop-in!"
Google Friendly Site Index
Authored by: anonymous on Thursday, January 16 2003 @ 02:22 PM EST
I added some code to make the site index more useful for human readers as well.

I replaced the \'$order = \' line with:


$DateHeader = \'<a href=\"?orderfield=date\">Date</a>\';
$TopicHeader = \'<a href=\"?orderfield=tid\">Topic</a>\';
$TitleHeader = \'<a href=\"?orderfield=title\">Title</a>\';

if ($orderfield == \'date\') {
$orderfields = \"date DESC\";
$DateHeader = \"Date\";
} elseif ($orderfield == \'tid\') {
$orderfields = \"tid, date DESC\";
$TopicHeader = \"Topic\";
} elseif ($orderfield == \'title\') {
$orderfields = \"title, date DESC\";
$TitleHeader = \"Title\";
} else {
$orderfields = \"date DESC\";
$DateHeader = \"Date\";
}

$order = \" ORDER BY $orderfields LIMIT $offset, $perpage\";


and then changed the $display.= \'<table width.... line to:

$display .= \'<table width=\"100%\"><tr><td>\' . $DateHeader . \'</td><td>\' . $TopicHeader. \'</td><td>\' . $TitleHeader. \'</td></tr>\';


This allows users to click on the headers to change the sort order. You can see it in action at:

http://cerebus.sandiego.edu/~jerry/blog/siteindex.php

Jerry
Google Friendly Site Index
Authored by: vinny on Saturday, January 18 2003 @ 04:38 PM EST
Looks like its working, just did a google search "mailing lists site:gplugs.sourceforge.net". Here are the results.

Looks like stories here are being indexed in google based on their 'permanent links'.

Sweet! big grin

Google Friendly Site Index
Authored by: Creator on Tuesday, January 21 2003 @ 08:50 AM EST
I have the siteindex.php up on two sites, and I noticed that inktomi (sp?)
search is following that file with no problems, but the googlebot seems
not to be? Maybe add the URL Rewrite function to siteindex.php to make
it more open to such bots?
Google Friendly Site Index
Authored by: anonymous on Thursday, January 23 2003 @ 08:25 AM EST

Nice--worked perfectly for me wink http://www.silverfishlongboarding.com/siteindex.php

Quick (unrelated) question--how do you get the post mode to default to HTML Formatted for comments?

Google Friendly Site Index
Authored by: anonymous on Sunday, March 02 2003 @ 01:39 PM EST

Thanks for this script. Any details on what Vinny is working on? I see that you guys are trying the "Permanent links" on the current installation. Any info on how you went about doing that would be really appreciated.

Another possibility could be using those "permanent links" in your siteindex - this imo would be an excellent intermediate fix.

Any info on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Google Friendly Site Index
Authored by: Creator on Tuesday, March 04 2003 @ 10:13 AM EST
I'm wondering if it would be possible to add indexing of static pages to
this indexing script? Also, adding an index for Geekary photos would be
nice, even more so for Filemgmt files...
Google Friendly Site Index
Authored by: anonymous on Sunday, March 07 2004 @ 07:24 PM EST
It seems to be fault! :-( I became a: The requested URL /gplugs/files/siteindex.tar.gz was not found on this server. Please, can anybody send me the right URL?
My adress is as follows:
onno@predo-team.de

Thanks a lot!
Onno
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