Building Dynamic Pages With Search Engines in Mind

Almost any developer knows that search engine placement is critical to the success of a web site. What many people don't know is that a lot of search engines cannot index many database-driven pages (basically any page with a '?' or '&' in the URL).

So when I set about building gotoCity.com, one of my goals was to make the site database-driven, but still indexable. I didn't want any use of cookies or mile-long URLs, and the site had to be co-brandable to top it all off. That meant the look-and-feel of the site had to be dependent on which "affiliate" site was being accessed (gotoCity.com is just one incarnation of the "DirectriCity" engine).

To pull this off, I started with a subtle Apache feature that can "force" a script to be called for any certain directory tree. In my case, I wanted all URLs that fall under "/local/" to call a script. This would be MUCH easier than creating 200,000 localized, co-branded web pages and a genuine directory structure to match it.

So in Apache's access.conf file, I added the following lines:

<Location /local>
ForceType application/x-httpd-php3
</Location>

This forces everything under the "/local/" directory to call a script called "local" in the root of my server. "local" then uses PHP to parse the URL and act accordingly:

Next Page

Sample Code | Columns | Mail Archive | Support | Get Started! | Links | Contribute!

Contact (non support questions)

By viewing these pages you agree to the Legal Terms of Service.

  Geocrawler.com | GoToCity.com | DirectriCity.com | PHPBuilder.com | The Des Moines City.net