Building Dynamic Pages With Search Engines in Mind

<?php

/*
Sample URLs: 
/local/2/us/IA/a/50613/apartment/ - apartments in Cedar Falls, IA
/local/2/us/IA/a/                 - group of cities in Iowa
/local/2/us/                      - States in the US
/local/1/us/IA/a/50301/           - Des Moines City.net
*/

$url_array=explode( "/",$REQUEST_URI);   //BREAK UP THE URL PATH 
                                        //    USING '/' as delimiter
$url_affil_num=$url_array[2];           //Co-Branding info
$url_country=$url_array[3];             //Which Country?
$url_state=$url_array[4];               //Which State?
$url_alpha_state=$url_array[5];         //Cities starting with a-g
$url_zip=$url_array[6];                 //If present, build thispage
$url_content=$url_array[7];             //If present, build a sub- 
                                        //    page for this city

/*
separate includes were designed to fetch the affiliate cobranding
and build appropriate style sheets on the fly. Data validation is
done prior to each query. If a URL is incorrect, bow out gracefully
or redirect home 
*/

if($url_zip) {  

/* 
If present, query the Zip code database and build the page.
Inside the city.inc, we will check for which "content page" we are
building, if any. 
*/

    include( 'include/city.inc');
    exit;

} elseif ($url_state) { 

/* 
If URL PATH ends here, query Zip code database, 
selecting DISTINCT cities in this state 
*/

    if (!$url_alpha_state) {
        $url_alpha_state= 'a';
    }
       include( 'include/state.inc'); 
    exit;

} elseif ($url_country) {

/* 
If URL PATH ends here, query ZIP code database,
selecting DISTINCT states for this country 
*/

    include( 'include/country.inc');
    exit;

} else { 

/* 
must be mal-formed. Redirect to home 
*/

    Header(  "Location:  http://db.gotocity.com/local/2/us/");
    exit;
}

?>

As you can see, if you break everything up into includes, and you have a sensible hierarchy, this task is not terribly difficult. I now have over 200,000 dynamic web pages that can be traversed by *any* web indexing engine! The number increases proportionately with each new affiliate (just create a new affiliate record in the affiliate table)

Next week, I will talk about Logging. I built a sophisticated, PHP logging and redirection engine to power this system.

I would appreciate any comments/criticisms about this article or how my system could be improved.

Tim Perdue

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