PHP , url and Google

[dan]

I have a site that I developed that uses I page main.php. all content
is decided by a variable. It's a magazine web site so there are
issues per month. I use a session variable to keep track of what
issue they are looking at. From that session variable I can change
color, background and menu list. Now the session variable is set by
default according to what month it is.

Now, there are regular articles that are in each issue so in each
issue you get:
main.php?dir=asphalt

And according to what issue the session variable is set to you will
get any of the articles by the same author.

QUESTION
If Google scans a previous month and it comes up on Google, it will
send you to the current column and not the older one that had the key
word in it. How can I make a URL that will allow Google to know the
difference?

Thanks for any help!

[Kevin Thorpe]

What a chestnut this is. Your problem is that you are generating content
which is not identified completely by the url. There's no way that a
search engine can deal with this. All of them work the same way;
indexing the URL which generated the text they have analysed.

What you need is to build a system so you can give a URL to go directly
to an article placed in whatever context you wish (several article
references may return the same page):
http://www.server.com/articles.php?article=3d56fe435e42
Or better still as some search engines still don't handle GET parameters
properly:
http://www.server.com/articles.php/3d56fe435e42.html
..and articles.php can pick out the article ref from PATH_INFO

Secondly you want to feed those to Google instead of your main url. You
can check the user-agent header for Google and redirect to a plain list
of all your article URLS. Google will then happily index them all for you.

[dan]

Well, in stead of using session variables, is there an easy way to
append a url variable to every hyperlink? Obviously there are
thousands of link in the site so I'm wondering if there is a way to
add the Issue variable to the end of every hyperlink so Google will
know.

Also does anyone know of a good tutorial on PHP and
> http://www.server.com/articles.php/3d56fe435e42.html
> ..And articles.php can pick out the article ref from PATH_INFO

Thanks

Kevin Thorpe <ke...@pricetrak.com> wrote in message news:<4018dc0f$0$21703$afc3...@news.easynet.co.uk>...

[Philipp Lenssen]

dan wrote:

> I have a site that I developed that uses I page main.php. all content
> is decided by a variable. It's a magazine web site so there are
> issues per month. I use a session variable to keep track of what
> issue they are looking at. From that session variable I can change
> color, background and menu list. Now the session variable is set by
> default according to what month it is.

And that's a bad idea -- a URL should be uniquely identiying content
the day it sees the light of the Web. So you should also put the month
in the variable like this:

main.php?dir=asphalt&month=2004-01
main.php?dir=asphalt&month=2003-12
etc.

This helps for...
- Bookmarks
- Google
- All other search engines
- Links from the outside
- etc.

Now you might actually do a Google-referrer hack using the Google Web
API (you can find out which content is actually stored in Google for
your URL at any given moment in time by querying the Google Cache).
But instead of trying to debug the symptom, fix the source of the
problem.

Hope it helps!

--
Google Blogoscoped
http://blog.outer-court.com

[dan]

> And that's a bad idea -- a URL should be uniquely identiying content
> the day it sees the light of the Web. So you should also put the month
> in the variable like this:
>
> main.php?dir=asphalt&month=2004-01
> main.php?dir=asphalt&month=2003-12
> etc.

ok, if I do this, does anyone have an idea how to dynamically add the
end variable to the end of every href? there are a lot of links and
to be able to append that variable to the end of it would be the
easiest.