[SirCastor]

Anyone have any thoughts about this? I don't know specifically how spiders go about finding sites, do they just call up the page with an http request? I need to get some exposure for a website that I've designed.

My Sites aren't ridiculously dynamic. They plug in the head of a webpage and the tail end. It gives me a little flexibility in overal site design while keeping the pages managible. Any suggestions? Recommendations? (I'm not using any database stuff here, so that's not an issue.)

[moodymonster]

just make sure your site's internal links are good ie links to the main pages are there on every page and so on. And use tags like h1, h2 etc so spider's can know how to breakdown the info. Repeat keywords if you can.

Search for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) in google for more in depth stuff.

Get the site linked to by putting it's address around, in your sig here, web directories, anywhere you can link to the site from.

The more links to your site spiders find, the higher they will rank it.

You can find out how sites rank by looking at http://www.alexa.com/ (Click on traffic rankings at the top).

[mr_friendly]

not sure if this is part of your question, but if you want the spiders to "find" each of your dynamically generated pages, you could put on your SiteMap page a listing of the dynamic pages. Let's say you have a dynamically generated page to display a database's article item. Insert onto the SiteMap page a For-Loop that would grab a resultset of all the articles in the db, then write hyperlinks to the dynamic page for each item.

Yes, Moody is correct that hte more links you have the faster the spiders will index your site. I also agree with Moody's suggestion of researching SEO. You may want to check out these sites for more info: http://seochat.com/ and http://cre8asiteforums.com/ and http://www.seomoz.org/beginners.php

Good luck.

[CaptainHaddock]

One issue is how your page URLs are formed. If they have query strings, e.g. " yoursite.com/page.php?dynamicstuff", Google and other engines might not index those pages, considering them not to be permanent content.

If your pages have normal URLs and they're all linked, you should have no problem.

[Love Calm Quiet]

It's strange... Google does seem to de-emphasize links with "php?" in them. Yet some get through.
For example:
Doing a google on ... CaptainHaddock and MacNN ... yields:
http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?t=278598
(though not 759 links)
And googling for CaptainHaddock yields several at macosxhints.

I've seen references in blog software to some process that produces "static links" or some such out of the dynamic blog content. Apparently there's some way to have the best of both.
Anybody know exactly what they're doing?

[Chris O'Brien]

They're probably using mod_rewrite or scripting it in themselves, or maybe even just using a framework like rails.

[CaptainHaddock]

Yeah, almost every blogging engine uses mod_rewrite to make every link look like a real file, e.g."myblog.com/articles/someone-is-stalking-me-using-google", and then Apache converts that on-the-fly into a query string for the site engine. I gather it's pretty easy to have ".php?foo" look like "/foo" to search engines that way.

[Love Calm Quiet]

Originally Posted by Chris O'Brien

They're probably using mod_rewrite or scripting it in themselves, or maybe even just using a framework like rails.

Thank you, Chris. That shows me right where I need to start expanding my PHP sophistication.