hadoob024 Posted January 29, 2007 Share Posted January 29, 2007 OK. Here's my setup. I want to see what changes I need to make in order to help with search engine optimization. First of all, my first main page that does anything is index.php. Now, I know by default, pages get directed to index.html, right? So, to get it to index.php, I'm assuming that I have to do something similar to this in order to bypass user interaction:<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.blahblah.com/index.php">So, my first question is how does this affect search engines? Because index.html is technically the first page, but it doesn't have anything in it that search engines look for other than maybe an appropriate TITLE and a META description tag, right?Then my second question is regarding the index.php page. On this page, we have a simple form verifying whether or not the user has read our EULA. How does having this simple form affect spiders crawling my site? Will they be able to read through it and then crawl the rest of my site? Thanks in advance! Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/36245-solved-php-forms-and-search-engine-optimization/ Share on other sites More sharing options...
hadoob024 Posted January 30, 2007 Author Share Posted January 30, 2007 Oops. A quick edit. Actually, index.php isn't the main page. Even this page does a redirect. It checks to see if the EULA cookie has been set. If so, then it sends the user to the main page. If it hasn't been set, then it sends them to the disclaimer page. Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/36245-solved-php-forms-and-search-engine-optimization/#findComment-172539 Share on other sites More sharing options...
ToonMariner Posted January 30, 2007 Share Posted January 30, 2007 It looks like you are doing everything in your power to prevent the spiders from indexing all you site that this could be a chapter entitled Don't Do...html redirects are one of the things that cause a few spiders to immediately leave your site and not bother indexing anything. I suggest you take a fresh look at how you can change your site so that redirects are nor required. If your server configuration allows it (most do) simply delete your index.html / index.htm file and the index.php (or index.asp etc.) will be served by default.There are other issues in there like how a bot carries on from a form etc etc. but somethings you just can't avoid. Perhaps your site would benefit if there was more information pages that can be viewed prior to the client having to agree to the eula; that way you could guarantee more opportunity for crawlers to index the site.I am positive others will have better an more helpful comments to make... Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/36245-solved-php-forms-and-search-engine-optimization/#findComment-172732 Share on other sites More sharing options...
hadoob024 Posted January 30, 2007 Author Share Posted January 30, 2007 Hmmmm... That's exactly what I was worried about. I'm thinking about gutting all that stuff, and instead just adding a disclaimer to the copyright section mentioning the same stuff but without requiring user interaction. Now, suppose I want the user to go to aboutus.php by default (this page has the most amount of informational text which is what I'm guessing the search engines are looking for), can I set this on my server, or will it be looking for index.php? Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/36245-solved-php-forms-and-search-engine-optimization/#findComment-172809 Share on other sites More sharing options...
ToonMariner Posted February 1, 2007 Share Posted February 1, 2007 unless you have access to the apache config yourself OR the server allows you to alter settings using a htaccess file (all this assuming you have apache of course) then you can select which page shoudl be served by default.Hot hot on apache stuff but if you do have either option open to you then I believe the command you'd use is:DirectoryIndex aboutus.php Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/36245-solved-php-forms-and-search-engine-optimization/#findComment-174450 Share on other sites More sharing options...
hadoob024 Posted February 1, 2007 Author Share Posted February 1, 2007 Yup. Running Linux and Apache, and I have access to the server so I should be able to make that change. And as for the "user experience" and as far as spiders are concerned, setting the default page to aboutus.php doesn't matter, right? This is stuff done on the server side, so it really shouldn't affect anyone for anything, correct? Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/36245-solved-php-forms-and-search-engine-optimization/#findComment-174677 Share on other sites More sharing options...
ToonMariner Posted February 2, 2007 Share Posted February 2, 2007 correct(ish) lol ;) Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/36245-solved-php-forms-and-search-engine-optimization/#findComment-175799 Share on other sites More sharing options...
hadoob024 Posted February 3, 2007 Author Share Posted February 3, 2007 sweeeeet! that's good enough for me ;D Quote Link to comment https://forums.phpfreaks.com/topic/36245-solved-php-forms-and-search-engine-optimization/#findComment-176115 Share on other sites More sharing options...
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