content management systems

[jholcomb]

WebDoctor you are absolutely right in what you said. However in most cases I have checked the servers for their configuration or to see if a hash might be present in URL's. In all cases (except for 2 where there were hashes in the URL) I have found it to be a matter of Googlebot simply not being able to "read" some URL's properly. The disappointing fact is that it seems to be selective with no real pattern to it. While some pages are indexed fine others are left out.

I have even tested the usage of sitemaps and although it does indeed help to some extent it still is not enough.

I think the solution for CMS systems is to actually take into account mod-rewrite when programming the CMS itself. The disappointing factor is that nearly all CMS solutions do not. As many have grown well past beta stages they do not want to go back and take the time to address the issue.

[raygonzalez]

Today more and more sites are utilizing a CMS.

Historically it has caused nightmares for the SEO.

Most CMS do not take SEO in to consideration, so when it comes time for SEO a ton of changes need to be, other solutions including static landing pages or mirror the site for the search engines.

At first we thought it was simply the ? mark, however many of our clients sites have awesome rankings inside of Google even with the ?.
We have been able to get Google to index sites with the ? mark.

A big part of SEO is naming the pages, unique titles and descriptions and naming the images and using the ALT tags.

All of these things can be taken into consideration when building a CMS.

Over the past year we have actually built our own CMS, the entire program was built around SEO. The first few versions were really only for our internal staff and to speed things up.

Soon after that we landed a large ecomerce site that was built using a CMS.
When we first optimized the site we were contracted to optimize 150 pages of the 500+ pages. The system made things really difficult, when the client would create a new page the optimization was not included in the new page.

Our client actually makes changes 3 or 4 times a day to the site.
Depending on what is in stock pages are taken offline and then put back online at a later date. But when new pages were created the optimization again was not included. WIth in 2 months there were only 15 pages with the optimization code left on the live site.

We took the CMS a step further, considering how often the client is changing the site, we intergrated his current CMS with our CMS, this gave the client control over adding the optimization code to new pages.

We went from having to twak 150 pages down to tweaking 20 templates.
Saved us a ton of time and in turn a huge savings for the client.

We built our CMS around the SEO, but sicne we are also a complete web development compnay, many of our clients don't go with the optimizaiton.
Instead of building two CMS we just built the one, however we are able to turn off the optimization part.

Our designers and programmers are a trained it what it takes to create a search engine freindly site. Every site we build is built with SEO in mind whether or not the client takes the SEO.

An added benifit to do things this way is 6 months down the road when they decide they need the optimization a good portion of the set up is already finished, thus creating yet another savings for the client.

The new version which we are thinking of selling on the open market will be ready in about a month. Once it is we will be releasing the case studies and the do's and don'ts.

[ibuiltDOTnet]

Check out the

iBuilt.net Sitemanager

This content management utility will allow you to create complete sites that can be crawled by search engines.

[DanThies]

The scripting language is the reason those additional characters are in the URL's in the first place.

I'm a little confused. Are you saying that PHP forces you to use them, and Perl somehow doesn't? That's simply not true.

None of the search engines have the problem solved of indexing dynamic sites. In my experience Google is better at it, but that may be more a function of where our sites sit in terms of PageRank, which perhaps causes them to do a complete crawl. Having other sites that link to those internal (dynamic) URLs is no doubt a big help as well.

RDD: if you're still around, you should look at IIS Rewrite (http://www.iisrewrite.com) - it works pretty much the same as Apache's mod_rewrite.

[jholcomb]

Dan I'll take a look at "iis". Someone else had mentioned this to me before and I never got a chance to have a look.

Still, I disagree. I know that pagerank may have something to do with indexing. However I still see Googlebot having problems. When it goes to a page and hits it 30 to 40 times and get only halfway through the URL and stops at a "?" sign then you have to believe there is a problem.

When writing PHP in order to call certain dynamically generated pages raw PHP will force you to use additional characters. CGI is easily changed and additional characters are usually not necessary. I never said CGI had a problem with this.

Rewrite (to my knowledge) is the best way to force PHP to behave like you want it to. If there is a better method then I'd love to get my hands on it.

[TheWebDoctor(tm)]

Apache mod_rewrite doesn't care if the scripting language is Perl, PHP, Python, C variants, or any other language. It is a way the server converts and handles exchanges from files. You could modify your URL responses to be any extension you wish to use.

When outputing a different extension, the server needs to know how to handle that extension. Therefore, in Linux-variants you need to update your httpd.conf file so that the extension is understood. Much like this [ htm, html => pnd, tsf ] or whatever you choose. The point is any file extension can be used. One trick we use is to hide the server type for the less astute by changing the file extension to .exe.

If Apache is running on Windows or Mac then it will have the modifications set up somewhat differently.

[quot]I have a sign business and I am writing separate sites for each product and each keyword/phrase of each product. It is working well as far as ranking very well with search engines; however, I am very tempted to try a content management system to keep them organized. [/quot]

You are using a method the search engines provide advise upon. They suggest you do exactly as you are doing. Then you link all the alternate sites back to the main site and to each other. That helps you in more ways than one.

I would advise against moving your situation to a content management system. That action would hurt more than help. You are much better off doing what you do now. I actually employ that tactic and it works fine, but also gives people other ways to my main site without using "doorway" pages as so many think they need.

[DanThies]

Still, I disagree. I know that pagerank may have something to do with indexing. However I still see Googlebot having problems. When it goes to a page and hits it 30 to 40 times and get only halfway through the URL and stops at a "?" sign then you have to believe there is a problem.

No question that they still have a problem. Nobody's figured it out yet. The above sounds like they're hitting a bad link or something - they should be fetching the full URL of any link they try to follow. It would be great to see an example, though, where they just can't follow a perfectly good link, so post it if you can.

When writing PHP in order to call certain dynamically generated pages raw PHP will force you to use additional characters. CGI is easily changed and additional characters are usually not necessary. I never said CGI had a problem with this.

PHP, on many servers, is implemented as CGI rather than as an Apache module, but I think you're misinformed. PHP and Perl/CGI will use the "GET" method exactly the same way. They work the same way, and the language used has nothing to do with what's in the URL. What you're probably seeing are lots of really ugly implementations (like PHP-Nuke), or people using session variables and other unnecessary stuff.[/quote]

Rewrite (to my knowledge) is the best way to force PHP to behave like you want it to. If there is a better method then I'd love to get my hands on it.

Rewriting does the job, and I don't know of a better way to make PHP, ASP, or Perl based dynamic sites "look right" so that they're easier for spiders to crawl.

[jholcomb]

Dan

Being that we handle many nuke based web sites you may be correct in your thinking that the CMS is forcing the usage. However, PHP/CGI are not the same language. They CAN BE implemented to work together but that is on the server level and most web servers are not set up to do this in virtual hosting environments. They are different modules in Apache. You need a module to make them work together, I forget the name of it but I am sure I could dig it up if someone needs it. Raw PHP will force the use of extra characters in the URL.

As far as hitting a URL goes it usually goes something like this for example:

http://www.domain.com/anypage.php?blahblah=xyz123

Google will hit this:
http://www.domain.com/anypage.php
repeatedly and never make it past the "?". Funny thing is that it is hit-or-miss with no definite pattern. Some pages make it, while others do not. I will point out that this is for pages without session variables.

It seems pretty definitive to me that there is still a problem with Googlebot. Maybe there is something I am doing wrong, but I sure can't see it.

[DanThies]

Exactly, the problem there is Googlebot.

[Rabies]

I personally hope & feel that pop ups will go away one day. I see them as the graffiti of the Internet. :(

That's like saying all signage in a city should be taken down because it's "visual pollution". You have to qualify what kind of signs are offensive and which serve a needed purpose. (ie: Big ad billboard VS a School Zone warning).

Pop-up *ABUSE* is the problem, not just pop-ups in of themselves. Pop-ups can serve a useful purpose. Like in these very forums for example, a Private Message can appear in a pop-up. I prefer that method instead of receiving an email, or having to remember to check my PM inbox.

Also we have to make an income some how. It's ridiculous when webmasters put up pop-up after pop-up on every page, but when it's one pop-UNDER that appears once a day and no more, that's very tolerable. We can tolerate having our television shows interrupted every 10 minutes, so what's the occasional pop-up gonna do to us?

These pop-up blockers should be designed to detect when there's pop-up abuse, rather than just blocking them all.