Hey Guys,

I am currently storing my articles in a MySQL database and displaying them on a PHP page named "view_article.php?id=<number>"..

Now, I have internal links pointing to the different articles, so there is an HTML link to them, but for some reason Google is really docking my articles to at least the 15th page...

Does anyone know if Google doesn't like the practice of storing your content in a database and pulling it down using a display page, like I have with my articles?

I mean, I'm typing in my articles exact title, which I use as the page title and a h2 tag, and I'm still showing up wayyyyy down there. A few weeks ago all the articles were at the top, so I'm at a loss as to why they're dropping their rank.

Any help or ideas would be much appreciated.

Hope all is well -

Well......I do not think storing articles in a database is bad practice it may be some other reason of dropping the rank of your articles.

Does anyone know if Google doesn't like the practice of storing your content in a database and pulling it down using a display page, like I have with my articles

Google don't know and don't care how your articles are stored and displayed.

I mean, I'm typing in my articles exact title, which I use as the page title and a h2 tag, and I'm still showing up wayyyyy down there. A few weeks ago all the articles were at the top, so I'm at a loss as to why they're dropping their rank.

And how many copies of these articles exist?

I'll just give you an example :

"MySQL datetime PHP Formatting"

Used as the title and in an h2.

This is the article :
http://www.colorplexstudios.com/view...p?article_id=2

When you type in that phrase it's on the 15th page. Now I understand that there are some sites that should be above me, but I really don't see it as a 15th pager, especially when it used to be #2 for a couple weeks before they all just shot down the ranks..

What do you expect from a site that is at most 6 months old?

Domain Name: COLORPLEXSTUDIOS.COM
Created on: 15-May-07
Expires on: 15-May-08
Last Updated on:

I know age is a factor, but I really didn't think it was that huge of a factor...

Bah, I'm one of those people that always has to be busy...and being helpless bothers me!!!

Chris will disagree, and the man has a lot of experience ... but I think it's your urls. Google typically doesn't know or care how your content is stored. Content is data, and it's perfectly valid to store it in a database. But using the same physical page to serve up wildly different content, with nothing in the query string that any real information can be gleaned from ... in that case it's perfectly obvious how the site works. That really doesn't affect how well one of your pages answers a search query, although a lot of people think you get more credit for things that show up anywhere in your url; this is why most bloggers change their link structure.

The company I work for full time has about 50,000 indexed pages in Google served from less than a dozen physical pages, using xid=y query string parameters. But they also have many, many links pointing to each of them. You could probably overcome the issue with lots of links from lots of different hosts with similar text to your page title ... which tend to come in time when you write useful content.

Thanks Forrest, I've heard rumors of that before but was unsure of any actual proof. I'm going to do some URL rewriting and see if that helps my cause..

I found this article helpful, for other people interested in this topic :

http://www.webconfs.com/dynamic-urls...-article-3.php

I could be wrong on the issue ... you might want to hold off until a few others weigh in on the issue?

I would have to agree with you, Forrest. I have always been under the impression that search engines preferred "clean" URLs that were descriptive and pertained to the content of the page. Besides the fact that content is being generated server-side before Google gets a hold of it, Google not liking content pulled from DBs wouldn't be practical. Otherwise, 99% of all CMS' and blogs would be penalized.

tested this. one site, from new

half the pages done with query strings, rest of pages done with rewritten URLs

75% of the querystring URLs were indexed before the rewritten ones.

They were indexed, but how well did they rank among the docs with rewritten URL's?

I read about 20 articles last night and they all said the same thing. Basically they will index them but the more descriptive the page name, the more Google knows about the page, thus higher rankings among your search phrases.

But who knows....I setup all my articles to have friendly URL's last night...it can't possibly hurt..

more likely you read 20 versions of one article,

Having keyworded page names and folder names helps with SE rankings in one instance and one instance only.
That is when a link is given and the page / folder name is used as the anchor text.

but the more descriptive the page name, the more Google knows about the page,

This is so blatantly and obviously wrong. there are millions upon millions of pages without stupidly long hyphenated names that have ranked perfectly well for years and will continue to do so without the dubious benefits of "search engine friendly page names".

The other point about this is,

What if you get it wrong, and the phrase used for the page name isn't a magic phrase that will bring buyers to the site in droves, credit card in hand?
Do you change them all and lose any ranking they happened to attain for several months?

The upshot is, name your pages and folders to make site maintenance simpler and if they happen to help in some small way, then it's a bonus.

Missed answering this;

They were indexed, but how well did they rank among the docs with rewritten URL's?

No noticeable difference where two or more of the pages turned up for phrases.

Some queries would indent the "friendly name", other times the querystring would indent.

This is one of those times where "experts" like to convince themselves they are right. Subjective testing will very often return the result you are expecting.

It is impractical to prove conclusively. Objective testing would require identical pages that are indexed and ranked concurrently (mirror sites). On one have rewritten URIs, and on the other, querystring URIs. Herein lie some problems.

1/ Duplicate pages get filtered out eventually. So you have no way of telling which

2/ Second Generation querystring pages are a little more difficult to get indexed.

If the test site falls into 2/, the test would be invalid; as rewriting the URIs would remove a barrier to the crawlers, get more pages indexed which would in turn help to give a rankings boost to all the pages via the improved linkage.

This is where I believe the myth has come from and is the usual product of mixing up cause and effect.
In this case the effect is better ranking and because the only thing that has changed are the URLs, therefore rewriting URLs must mean SE "prefer" them and give better ranking, and as this is the anticipated result, the issue is solved.
Very few of these "experts" have the analytical skills (or chose not to use them ) to investigate further into the result to see if there are other explanations. They simply publish their findings as absolutes.
Maybe it's ego or maybe it's the "publish or perish" motivation that drives this behaviour, but then others wishing to appear just as knowledgeable pick up this "report" and spread it far and wide and it is never questioned just accepted as "fact"

Google bolds matches in their serps, and they do show matches in the url. From the domain name out to the end of the string:

» The Cascade Loop | Fine Art Photography Blog
Traditionally the Cascade Loop means heading east on US 2 over Stevens Pass, but having been there less than two weeks ago, I stayed on US 97, following the ...
blog.forrestcroce.com/the-cascade-loop/2007/07/29/ - 22k - Cached - Similar pages - Note this

It's true that Google has purposely made it difficult to test things like this. But all else being equal, if the url were blog.forrestcroce.com/post.php?id=7 instead, which is the default from wordpress, I bet it would take a little more to rank for the same query.

I don't have any evidence to back that up. But if you were going to write a search engine, you'd probably take what Chris wrote earlier to heart. You can't just go changing your urls every time you want to chase a different keyword ... they're pretty static. So they're probably a better indication of what a page is about than what somebody uses bold text for.

They probably don't make a lot of difference. But again if you're using a cms, and write identical content on the same domain, go about your business in exactly the same way ... when somebody does a search for keywords in your url, versus the same content and the same links with the same anchor text pointing to a url structure that only has meaning for the underlying database the pages are served from, it makes sense that the urls with more information in them would do a little better against a computer algorithm. Not much, probably, and all things aren't equal; real world differences are going to outweigh any benefit that might come from 'friendly' urls. But for a new site, if there isn't much at stake yet, I would go for the more verbose urls.