What about google and other search engines?

[mcschulz]

I was wondering how good cmsms pages ( or mysql driven sites in general ) are rated by google and other searchbots compared to static pages.
I know about the cmsms feature, that can display your google-rank, but it would be great if someone could tell me.

How can I optimize cmsms pages for search engines? Should I still have a robots.txt ( what should it look like? )? Any hints are welcome

[mcschulz]

Does it make any difference for the googlebot wether I use mod_rewrite or not?
What are the basic ups and downs of using mod_rewrite with cmsms?

[Tom]

Just do it. Eventhough, google is now much better than it was in the past in recognizing the less friendly url's. I think the current one's should pose no problem, but just to be safe, I'm going for mod_rewrite where I can.

As far as I can tell, robots.txt is good just if you want to prevent google from indexing certain pages. I have never much need for it, only scarcely, and mostly putting an empty one on my sites, just to get rid of the error messages (page not found) in the logs.

[gravityman]

I recently put up www.aboutvenicebeach.com and it ranks in the top 10 for "venice beach" on MSN and is nowhere to be found for the same word on Google.  Perhaps anecdotal and I do get some Google hits for words that are more unique with less competition, but my general idea is that you won't rank well on Google for anything remotely competitive until you get some links from other sites.  CMSmadesimple seems well built for MSN though.

[nils73]

There are several myths about search engines and ranking. Since mod_rewrite is server based, Google and other search engines won't see it. They see what browsers and all other user agents see, so it won't to any harm to your site. Might be that - if you use friendly URLs along with descriptive menu names - some search engines rank you site higher than others. But beware: underscore (_) is not seen as a space ( ) and same applies to hypens (-) ...

What search engines like is table free layout with , ... for headlines. And there is yet another thing you should know: the more incoming links you have, the better your site ranks. Meta tags are useful, but do not apply for ranking any more. They are handy for some search engines because theyr read the description tag but beware: most search engines do not update it on a regular basis.

The conclusion: with CMSMS you can achieve a good ranking position, but there is no guarantee!

Regards
Nils

[Tom]

Perhaps anecdotal and I do get some Google hits for words that are more unique with less competition, but my general idea is that you won't rank well on Google for anything remotely competitive until you get some links from other sites.  CMSmadesimple seems well built for MSN though.

Exactly. Links links links. Google takes time for new sites. MSN can be almost immediate if you build it the right way.

[Tom]

Meta tags are useful, but do not apply for ranking any more. They are handy for some search engines because theyr read the description tag but beware: most search engines do not update it on a regular basis.

Agreed.

It is not every time, but content meta tag is being shown in the search results under the link to your website. At least at the moment I checked one of my websites in Google and it is shown.

If it is, what you put in the content meta tage makes substantial difference on whether the user clicks your site or not. Even if you are only no. 3 and not no. 1, some users might only click your site as the description under link will be more relevant to their search.

[fredt]

Since mod_rewrite is server based, Google and other search engines won't see it. They see what browsers and all other user agents see, so it won't to any harm to your site

I'm sorry, I don't catch this one. Does Google 'see' site/index.php?page=page1, or site/page1.shtml?

Right now, Google has just crawled my home page (site:www.cabinet-cilex.com only returns http://www.cabinet-cilex.com), not any page under it. Is there something special to configure, or should I just wait?

TIA, Fred (I don't know if I was supposed to open a new thread or re-open this one ?!? - If I'm wrong, I promise to read & learn the Forum FAQ...)

[Tom]

I'm sorry, I don't catch this one. Does Google 'see' site/index.php?page=page1, or site/page1.shtml?

Right now, Google has just crawled my home page (site:www.cabinet-cilex.com only returns http://www.cabinet-cilex.com), not any page under it. Is there something special to configure, or should I just wait?

TIA, Fred (I don't know if I was supposed to open a new thread or re-open this one ?!? - If I'm wrong, I promise to read & learn the Forum FAQ...)

Google sees the site/page1.shtml url.

With indexing, just wait. Sometime it takes time - depends on the number and quality of your incoming links, and whether you have some deep links (ie pointing to your deep pages) or just links to root url.

[nils73]

Does Google 'see' site/index.php?page=page1, or site/page1.shtml?

Actually Google can search a URL for certain strings. Messy URLs contain symbols / characters like "?" or "&" or "=" --- so Google can tell if a URL is messy or clean. Back in the good old times of plain HTML a page about a company was called "about.html" or "company.html" and a user could tell from looking at the URL where he or she was.

Nowadays you are at "index.php?page=34&style=plain&voodoo=0" --- actually this is the "about" page ... but you probably won't remember the correct page-id tomorrow. Or even in 10 minutes.

Okay, Google does not "forget" things since it is a machine and can store things and search items or strings. But Google pretends to be dumb and blind (in fact Google is blind because it does not see any design) and that is why Clean-URLs rank better most of the time. However we are running a blog with messy URLs but lots of incoming links ... and guess what? It ranks pretty well in Google and gets us a lot of traffic. Maybe things would be better with Clean-URLs ... but who knows?

Regards,
Nils