search engine optimised pages

[Mike Hughes]

Swee,

As I've said before, actinic creates links that go via the CGi scripts so that the site can present the proper information to users with accounts.

The only way to avoid this is to create your own menu's in HTML and hardcode the links in. This is what I do (I don't use member accounts) and it's definitely more search engine friendly.

Mike

[cdicken]

That's right. Actinic will always use a link of the format...

http://your.URL/cgi-bin/ss00000x.pl?...D=index%2ehtml

for the 'Products' link into the store. This is standard behaviour and is not a problem. There is also no way to change it. An explanation of the elements of this link is below...

· http://your.URL/cgi-bin is the URL of your CGI-BIN
· ss00000x.pl is the name of your search script with the 'x' replaced with your CGI ID number (in 'Advanced | Network Setup')
· index%2ehtml is the filename of the page you want people to land on. Note that you have to encode any non-alphanumeric characters so an underscore '_' becomes '%5f' and a full stop '.' becomes '%2e'.

I have explained to you elsewhere how to create 'fragments' within your home page in Actinic that link to your store using normal links. These links can then be followed by search engines with no problems.

[Mike Hughes]

Chris,

I just want to expand on the significance of internal linking and search engines.

The problem with links that go via the scripts is that the pagerank of an internal page is based on the links that go to it from all the other pages on the site (plus any external links to it).

Internal pages that have direct links to them from the home page and other pages will rank significantly better than those that don't. So it's not really a question of the search engines finding and indexing the pages (a link to the sitemap will sort that out) but more a case of how well they'll be ranked.

Yes, you can create additional links that will help boost certain pages, but unless you recreate the whole menu the internal pages just won't do as well.

Mike