I built a site with most content through $_get in the index. Bad for SEO?

[mattjbak]

The site I made has most of the content in the index, and then has checks for $_GET variables passed through links in the URL. I was wondering how search engines would use this... do they even see the content. What can I do?

Thank you!

 

[troytime]

if your links are set up the right way, google will still be able to crawl your site

its not good for SEO though

set up a mod_rewrite so your URLS look better

its really easy to make domain.com/?id=value look like domain.com/value/
RewriteRule ^([0-9A-Za-z\-]+)/?$ /index.php?variablename=$1 [L]

 

[Markbnj]

Google just announced yesterday or the day before that they are experimenting with crawling pages hidden behind form submissions. To expand on what troytime said... if the links are present as text on pages the spider can crawl, i.e. in an index on the front page, they will get crawled regardless of what the querystring looks like. If they depend on input from the user (as in a search form) then they likely will not be crawled at this time.

 

[mattjbak]

troy is seems like your reply is just what I need... can you just explain it out a little better for me, say I have this as a link http://www.url.com/?page=page , how would i make it both look better and make it good for crawling in code? you're the best, thank you so much

 

[troytime]

Originally posted by: mattjbak
troy is seems like your reply is just what I need... can you just explain it out a little better for me, say I have this as a link http://www.url.com/?page=page , how would i make it both look better and make it good for crawling in code? you're the best, thank you so much

sure.
assuming you're using apache server - you can create an htaccess file (.htaccess)

its just a text file

in it, put this:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^([0-9A-Za-z\-]+)/?$ /index.php?page=$1 [L]


then your links will be href="/pagename/" instead of href="/index.php?page=pagename"

 

[mattjbak]

Hmm I saw a dot.htaccess file in the server root, added the rule to that with no change, went into my web directory and added a new one there with only the two lines that you specified and nothing changed, then added to all the folders in the site and still no change. There has to be some reason it's not being loaded. Any ideas? Thanks again for all the help

 

[troytime]

the .htaccess goes in the the html directory, although you can have a different htaccess in every directory

can you provide a link? (in PM if you don't want to post it)

 

[NiKeFiDO]

there are also settings in apache that needs to be set. Chances are they are already set up for you, but no two web hosts are exactly the same

Just to be clear, your $_GET variables should still be descriptive (for instance, use category strings rather than numbers) - if you successfully rewrite your URL but it's still "joesasianbbq.com/4/565" then it still isn't helping you out in terms of SEO. (vs something like "www.joesasianbbq/food/pork/45")

Also, i wouldn't concentrate too much on this "problem" - if you have these links in your HTML code then Google bot will find them. The more important part than your actual link (href) is the text in and around the link - the text, the title tag and the context of the paragraph text (if any) around the link.

Lastly, make sure your links are in places that googlebot can find them. Make a site map just to be sure (site maps with lists of URLs are OK, but making them user friendly is a great idea - don't just make the text of the link the actual URL!)

Good content is king in SEO now a days