Hello -

I'm working on a 'gallery' script, and I found a way that might make things a little easier for me and the client I'm working for.

Basically, I set up the .htaccess file to use anything before .html as a variable, which I'll then use to pull records from a db.

Example: user goes to mysite.com/family_movies.html

The script passes you to gallery.php, and makes variables of family and movies. The page then shows you records which are movies related to family. I'm also going to have meta info pulled from the db.

Basically this would make things easy on the client, because to 'create' new pages all they have to do is link to them (eg. vacation_photos.html, birthday_movies.html etc)

My 1st Question: (possibly followed by others)
- Will this method allow me to submit URLs to search engines? The pages aren't really 'on the server', but it will show you what you want based on whatever is entered before the .html

Thanks for any insight!

There is a nice myth that goes that search engines don't like dynamic urls, while this is true in some contexts it is changing for the better all the time. What you are doing is telling the server to treat dynamic urls as static and so a search engine would see many static pages and crawl through them fine, because of the way most speculate the algorithm to work your pages will be considered more important than if they were using the dynamic urls.

In short: Yes

Jamie

There is never a need to "submit" to search engines with any kind of URL, they will find your site from links to your pages

I definately agree with Jamie on this one. In the eyes of the crawler they are receiving a valid response with content from your server, to them the page exists. However the programming handles it doesn't really matter, if you have content going back to the spider you are fine.

Of course you still want to avoid duplicate content, such as your example family movies; would movies family return the same content? If you can avoid doing things like that, all the better!

braintoss there's a pretty good book called Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP that came out a couple of months ago.

It's worth the read and talks a lot about rewriting dynamic URLs with .htaccess. I think there are better was to do what you want, though it may not make things as simple for your clients.

One thing to remember though about clients is that the more you make things easier for them to update the less likely the pages will be optimized for search engines. There's a balance and you'll have to decide which is more important.