Alibaba website html why? Its massive

[Steven1976a]

Ive been looking through Alibaba website and as far as I can see all of the site is made with html.
I posted a couple of weeks ago about Html Vs database driven sites for SEO asking which is the best.

Have www.alibaba.com made all 3 million pages in html static pages so that the search engines can index all pages more easily? I just find it amazing that a site which has been bought for about 1billion dollars by yahoo could be running a site which is all edited in html. How can they control it.

Any suggestions why?? SEO or just a project that grew too large and they cant change?

[flood6]

It's not really just html. With Apache machines (and I imagine other servers) you can make ".html" extensions be processed using php and other scripting languages.

So it uses ".html" extensions, but it's processed using php, asp, or something similar.

[freehits]

Yep on what flood said. All my sites are php changed to .html with rewrite, for superstition if nothing else.

[DrTandem1]

Yes, my question was to be, "How have you determined that the site is static HTML?" The page rendered may appear that way, but could have come from a database.

[freehits]

well I click on this link
http://www.alibaba.com/catalogs/9/Mi...tml?tracelog=%

And I get 1 page


Then I switch the numbe rin the URL manuallly to a 10

http://www.alibaba.com/catalogs/10/M...tml?tracelog=%

And I get a diffeent page

Then I switch it to an insane number '4545'

http://www.alibaba.com/catalogs/4545...tml?tracelog=%

And I get a blank page, but the source code has a head and body tags in it.

That looks like a database driven page to me.

[colr]

It doesn’t make any difference whether your site is static HTML or database generated HTML, as all that the client sees (which includes the Search Engines) is the HTML code.

colr__

[afcredultra]

They most likely are using a content management system.

[Faglork]

Originally Posted by Steven1976a

I just find it amazing that a site which has been bought for about 1billion dollars by yahoo could be running a site which is all edited in html. How can they control it.

Not edited by hand ... this is a specialized directory software. Given the right software, generating static pages is no problem at all. I do the same, although with a much smaller directory ;-)

I use HYPERSEEK directory software, and a nightly cron job to generate static html pages from my database. Takes approx. 30 seconds for about 2000 entries, and this is an ordinary middle-class webserver.

In case of ALIBABA, with 300.000 visitors/day, it makes sense to keep the directory static to reserve server resources for the search function.

faglork