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Getting
Your Database Site into Search Engines
Search
engines are creatures of habit, and have historically been cautious
about indexing dynamically produced Web sites—aka
ASP sites or database sites. Search engines don't like to spider
dynamic sites because some of these will generate an infinite
number of pages automatically, so it's a waste of resources.
The WSU, CAHNRS and WSU Extension Web sites used to utilize
search engine software that was running on our own servers, so
we could configure our search engine to spider your database
page. But the main WSU site is now using Google as its WSU search
engine, and this outside search engine might not be indexing
your database-driven site. Do not despair, for there are ways
of getting into the Google index. The first is to actually submit
your database URLs to Google. You can do so at
http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
The
problem is that there are other search engines out there, and
your site still might not be receiving the attention it deserves,
because the other search engines might also be ignoring your
database pages. Submitting all your pages to all of those search
engines would be quite labor intensive. Instead, I would recommend
that you make
a static site map that links to all of your database pages,
or at least the major ones. Link to your static site map from your
home page. Search engines will typically go to any database page
that is linked from a static HTML page (but often no further).
So if you create a site map on a static page, this should help
your penetration in Google, Alta Vista, HotBot, etc.
What
about search engine submission services?
I typically recommend avoiding them. In my opinion, the majority
of these are fraudulent, particularly ones that you become aware
of through unsolicited commercial email (spam).
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A
static HTML page is typically one that ends in .htm
or .html. It is generally created by a human on a desktop
computer, and uploaded to the server. A database page
is a page that the server creates ("on the fly")
with select information from a database. You can sometimes
recognize these by the use of non-standard characters in the
URL, such as the ampersand (&) and question mark (?),
the lack of the .html or .htm file extension, and sometimes
file extensions such as .asp or .php. Programmers can make
database pages look like static pages, but that wouldn't be
a concern in this case, because if you can't tell the difference,
neither can a search engine.
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