SearchableURL

Overview

SearchableURL encourages search engines to index your dynamically generated Web pages.

This allows URLs in your database-driven Web site to be written in a more search-engine friendly style, so you get both the power of a database and the benefits of stronger search-engine rankings.

If your Web pages are loaded dynamically from a database request, the links to those pages are likely burdened with long query strings. For example:

http://my-site.com/wkstone/webkeystone.py?key1=value1&key2=value2&key3=value3&...

Search engines often ignore URLs with query strings attached, like the one above. SearchableURL allows the same URL to be written without the query string, like so:

http://my-site.com/wkstone/webkeystone.py/Q/key1-value1/A/key2-value2/A/key3-value3/A/...

Any links that you would like to be followed by search engines can be re-written in the search-engine friendly style. The page will still be loaded dynamically from your database or script, exactly as if the URL still contained a query string, but this process will be invisible to search engines.

How To Create SearchableURLs

To translate your query-string laden URLs into SearchableURLs, follow these three steps:

Change the ? to /Q/
Change all & to /A/
Change all = to -

Important Notes:

SearchableURL makes use of phony directory names Q and A to hide the query string. This means that if your Web site has any real directories named Q or A that they will act unpredictably. It is strongly recommended that the directory names Q and A be avoided in a SearchableURL enabled site.
The key-value pairs in SearchableURLs are separated by the first dash in each pair. If the pair contains more than one dash, the extra dashes wind up as part of the value, not part of the key. For example:
```
http://my-site.com/wkstone/webkeystone.py/Q/one-two-three
```
becomes:
```
http://my-site.com/wkstone/webkeystone.py?one=two-three
```

Costs

Free with an Olympus8000 account
$15 per quarter with an Olympus4000 account

Updated 2005-12-08