James Zigrino
That much is common knowledge. However, two things are blatantly obvious -
- Developers are continually asked to design sites that by definition must be database driven or content managed.
- Few supposed experts can offer any solution to the 'query string' issue.
For those of you that are new to URL structure, a query string is the part of a URL that follows a ? or an &:
eg. www.example.com?var1=23&var2=47.
The query string is used to pass information from one page in a site to the next. Often this is used as part of a database query, the resulting data from which will become the basis of the next dynamic page.
Much search engine spider software was written several years ago, before there was a real requirement to maintain variables states between pages. Often search engine indexing algorithms make the assumption that data contained in a query string is transient and unlikely to remain current for long enough to be worth indexing (some spiders can take weeks to list your site after submission, and then weeks before re-visiting).
Well, the problem is clear, the question is - is there a way that we can solve this problem?
Take a look at the bigmouthmedia site. This is database driven. Take a look at www.amazon.com; this again is obviously database driven. But notice that neither site uses query strings in any of their URLs.
The trick to running a dynamic or database driven site is to find alternative ways to communicate your variables and data via URLs without scrificing the functionality of your site.
Bigmouthmedia, and Amazon have used two completely different approaches:
Bigmouthmedia uses a specially developed system of 'virtual static pages'. Each URL contains enough text to uniquely associate with a record in the database; a call to that page extracts the information from that record and uses it to build the page 'on the fly'. As far as the browser or visiting spider is concerned the resulting page is as real as any other static HTML page. One advantage of this technique is that it can be used on almost any web-server and requires no special set-up or the installation of any extra software.
Amazon on the other hand disguises variable data inside the directory-path part of the url, and uses specially configured web server software to decode and extract the information when it arrives, before passing a new, dynamically translated url on for processing. This means that all the URLs for their site appear static, and yet behave as if they contained query strings.
A third technique, that can often be successful is to use the ability most web server software offers of customising the 404-Page Not Found message. This allows a useful page to be returned no matter url is entered, and futher customisation could, for instance, parse the requested URL for clues as to what data you were trying to request and dyanmically return a page accordingly. Unfortunately, the web server would also return the 404 error code, causing some search engines search spiders and some web browsers to ignore it anyway, although some web server software, including Coldfusion and Microsoft IIS allow you to suppress this.
www.evolt.org say the advantages of "clean" URLs are -
- Enables indexing by search engines. As you probably know, when a search engine spiders your site and finds a query string it stops. After all, how on earth can the robot know that all the pages are not the same with just a different parameter passed to the page: what's the difference between index.php?type=article&id=25 and index.php?style=red? How can one expect a search engine to know the difference?
- Makes for more perennial URLs. As Tim Berners-Lee himself explained in Cool: URIs don't change, "It is the duty of a Webmaster to allocate URIs which you will be able to stand by in 2 years, in 20 years, in 200 years". You can see where we're aiming at.
- Doesn't expose the server-side language in which you developed the site: No extension is provided, thus enabling you to switch from one server-side technology to another without generating multiple 404 errors. Moreover, as a side note, it's a bit more secure because it will take potential attackers more time to know what language you're using (but don't have too many illusions about that, the solution will eventually be found...)
So you can see that using clean URLs affords other benefits to your site also.
This article was first published on 09 April 2002 and does not necessarily match current events or the current opinions and views of bigmouthmedia ltd.
