Dynamic, Search Engine Friendly Pages

The procedure described below was tested on a RedHat7.2 system running Apache web server.

You have to digest some bitter facts. Most search engines do not index URLs having the characters `?' & `='. It is standard practice to generate thousands of pages using just one template page. Such dynamic generation (from database, XML repository or any other source) traditionally required the use of `?'. The value after `?' in a URL is available as a CGI variable. So a single template page with different arguments would generate different pages.

So how do you generate dynamic pages, without making them search engine unfriendly? Consider this URL:

http://foo.com/template.php?var1=val1&var2=val2

This definitely is not search engine friendly. So you re-write the URL as:

http://foo.com/template.php/val1/val2

Using PHP you can process the above URL thus:

$tmp = explode($REQUEST_URI,"template.php/");
$vars = explode($tmp[1],"/");
$var1 = $vars[0];
$var2 = $vars[1];

Isn't that simple!

Additional Modifications

Doesn't `template.php' show off that it is a script file? Shouldn't we camouflage it so that it looks just as a directory? If you have `.htaccess' enabled in your Apache server, you can just do that!

Create a file `.htaccess' in the same directory where you place `template.php' with the following contents:

<Files template>
ForceType application/x-httpd-php
<Files>

Now rename the file `template.php' to `template'. `template' will be parsed as a PHP file. Now your URL looks more sexier:

http://foo.com/template/val1/val2

That is not the only thing Apache offers! You can also completely hide the script name:

http://foo.com/val1/val2

But this is a more complex procedure dealing with the Apache module MOD_REWRITE. Explaining this is beyond the scope of this article.

- Subhash
Sep.`02