Fusebox or the like and Search Engine Optimization

Thanks andw928. I should have said that I posted a similar question about 2 months ago about which method to use, so I have definitely settled on Fusebox.

This is a single operation, so the group requirement probably won't be there.

I was concerned about the web logging results, a conundrum. I believe as long as proper documentation is used, the file naming into function roles wouldn't be too difficult to manage. I posted a similar question a while ago about which one to use, and got some input that you can use whatever convention you want .

The last point, crippling the search engines is my primary concern. At the most I would have 2 url parameters, but the page parameter could be up to 3 words long with dashes (or underscores?). I just don't know how google handles content all being from one page, well, google and the others.

I do like the organization and reusability of fusebox. I like that it can be ported easily and that java is a snap to integrate. I also like that it will force me to stop writing spaghetti code! It's nice to have to write a query one time and keep it one place, combined with cfcs, 4.1 seems to be really powerful. I hope it isn't too difficult to debug!

Search engines will probably index 1 instance of index.cfm, they don't index depending on the query string, once they see a query string they stop indexing that file since they are afraid that they will fall into an endless loop. This is why search engines have a problem indexing dynamic content. Atleast with normal cfm files, it sees that one file is index.cfm, the other is contact.cfm, etc, but with fusebox, it will see it as 1 file and 1 file only.

Also, it is bad to show different information on 1 file, search engines consider this spamming. There are books on this stuff.

Ok, so the search engine fix seems simple enough. I'm going to have to make a lot of 301 cfheaders, that's for sure.

Thanks for the link duz.

substand - what method of design do you use now?

If you use 301, the search engine is going to know that. Wouldn't that trap it as a redirect and not index the page?

andw928

In the application.cfm, I'd have to use a bunch of switch statements to grab the template name, add a cfheader and set the location as the new fusebox style url. I can't just force all pages to redirect to the homepage or I'd get a lot of frustrated users. Of course, the old templates would have to remain in existance as blank pages so at least the application.cfm is processed.

That SES converter looks sweet.  I hadn't see anything like it for cf, only other languages.

As for method of design, I don't know that there is a name for it other than possibly "structured programming."  I try to make the code look and act like a more traditional programming language (say how they teach you to write in c/c++ courses), and keep display separate from computation as much as possible.   Its much easier to do that with mx than with prior versions, although I made valiant attempts back then.  

Or this one which is the same thing:

http://tutorial90.easycfm.com/

I had used a url converter in the past for coldfusion, but since most SE's can handle a variable or two, this wasn't necessary in the long run and our position was just fine. However, I think this would be a good idea to use since the template name for everything would be index.cfm.

I wonder how well the new MSN search engine can crawl dynamic content. I don't know about the URL converter where it changes your URL to something like: index.cfm/id/430/page/2

I mean, first off, I know that you can have a period as a character in a directory, but you think the google bots are stupid enough not to know that this is a malformed URL? I mean, you got index.cfm right in the middle, and things that seem to look like directories, only with numbers in them.

And, try doing #cgi.query_string# on one of these, and parsing this and getting the id's, it's just a mess. Your better off going with the mod_rewrite for Apache and there's one for IIS too.

andw928 -

>I wonder how well the new MSN search engine can crawl dynamic content.

It's quite good, it will crawl up to 4 and very occasionally 5 query parameters. Even so you need to keep the page one to three clicks away from the home page.

- duz

I cannot install any 3rd party software for IIS, so the mod_rewrite for IIS option is a no. I've read a few reports that these URLs can complicate a directory structure too much for google.  It would seem that people have had success simply using the default fusebox methodology with good action identifiers in the query string.

I'm not too happy with the url rewrite tool for a few reasons. It's not something I'd want to use for anything but a small app as basehrefs and messed up cgi variables can pose some very annoying issues.

I don't know, I've got the very expensive fusebox book coming to me that should hopefully shed some more light on the issue.

jtreher, I think you should actually stay with regular query strings. You're right, changing the query structure will confuse google and be hard to access in your application, it will be confusing, and having things organized is far more important than this, actually probably not..but...lol.

Plus, like duz said, MSN has the technology to actually spider dynamic content. Which is great.

It just seems like work arounds for SEO sort of goes against the 'don't create pages just for search engines' theme. Don't introduce workarounds just for search engines to bunk up your code. SEs that are still looking for .htm only pages are going to be hard pressed to find robust content to serve their loyal fans.

I read one quote from fusebox.org that said they most all pages indexed using index.cfm?fa=whateverHere

So, I guess if the pages are indexed then it is up to the page itself and backlinks to provide the rank.

Anyhow, I don't know if anyone will have anything else to say, but I'll surely post in here if I find any more info.

I've really enjoyed fusebox just for the sake of providing clarity and structure as I've worked with it the past month or so. Some of the points raised do bother me though.

I hate fusebox. Lol. Yup, like I said, organization is more important than SEO, although will definetely have SOME effect on SEO.

jtreher -

>It just seems like work arounds for SEO sort of goes against the 'don't create pages just for search engines' theme.

Creating pages 'just' for search engines is not the same as creating pages that are search engine friendly so I don't think you should worry on that score. All the major search engines provide guidelines for making pages search engine friendly. In the context of urls which we are talking about here for example Google says "It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few" and "Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index".

- duz