Meta tags and dynamic webpages

[marf]

My general understanding is webcrawlers look for html pages and search the meta tags. I notice alot of popular websites like http://www.good-tutorials.com/
for example, definantly has dynamic content on the main page, perhaps PHP, yet it appears to be an html page, so the webcrawler can find it easier. I don't remember where i heard this but if your main page is index.php, webcrawlers don't look at the meta tags.

also if you try

http://www.good-tutorials.com/index.htm
http://www.good-tutorials.com/index.html
http://www.good-tutorials.com/index.php

none work. How is he doing that? all of the links on that page as well are to folders not *.php or other file extensions.

Thanks for your responses in advance.

[Troy297]

I believe that all "he" did was not give the files an extension at all, which then enables the use of sub-functions on the page......

Example: If for instance my page is called mysite.com/search, when the user submits it the page becomes mysite.com/search?lang=eng&query=search+terms.

Make sense? I'm not sure what the page is classified as if it doesn't have an extension..... And as for the extension that the "guy" uses, im not sure - because he never actually links to the homepage other than using "goodtutorials.com"... hum... any other ideas?

[marf]

ok the other question then, if my main page is index.php

will the search engine crawler's still read the meta tags even tho the page is php and server side executed? like when the crawler looks at the page, is it first rendered server side then the crawler sees the html?

[Troy297]

Of course it will! I even include my meta tags USING php and it is still indexed properly... for instance try googling "QuickScriptz" and my site will be the 4th or 5th down "QuickScriptz.Ca.Kz - Power In Simplicity".

I use only PHP Pages.... but here are all the meta tags I use - the list is huge...

<META name="verify-v1" content="My-Google-Webtools-Verification-Code-Hidden" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; utf-8">
<meta name="title" content="QuickScriptz.Ca.Kz">
<meta http-equiv="Pragma" content="cache">
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX,FOLLOW">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en">
<meta name="description" content="A collection of free scripts and tutorials for webmasters and site developers.">
<meta name="abstract" content="A free script collection.">
<meta name="keywords" content="Quick, Scriptz, Free, PHP, HTML, Scripts, QuickScriptz, Abshost, Tutorials, Tutorial">
<meta name="author" content="QuickScriptz">
<meta name="publisher" content="QuickScriptz.Ca.Kz">
<meta name="copyright" content="QuickScriptz 2006 - All Rights Reserved">
<meta name="rating" content="General">
<meta http-equiv="Reply-to" content="quickscriptz@gmail.com">
<meta name="creation_Date" content="12/31/2006">
<meta name="expires" content="">
<meta name="revisit-after" content="2 days">
<meta name="doc-rights" content="Copywritten work">
<meta name="doc-class" content="Completed">
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="true">
<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="false" />

[ess]

The website is built on JSP technology...or at the least it appears to.

check the following to verify that yourself.
http://www.good-tutorials.com/index.jsp

As for using folders...the answer is simply a NO. You can use .htaccess files to re-write urls...or in the case of JSP files...you can specify url patterns in web.xml file.

Looking at the server used for Good Tutorials website, it seems that they are using Apache2.0.46 Running on Red Hat box. As such, one can deduce that they are either using mod_jk to link Apache with Tomcat, or jsp extension is not actually serving JSP pages. Instead, the extension has been used to serve PHP pages. You can achieve this by adding the following code to a .htaccess file.

AddType application/x-httpd-php .jsp

This will force the server to treat any file with a jsp extension as if it was a PHP file.

If there is anything else you are not sure about...let's know.

Cheers,
Ess

[Troy297]

Oh - and just to let you know... here is a list of all the possible web extensions "he" could have used.....

.htm
.html
.cgi
.shtm
.shtml
.php
.php3
.cfm
.cfml
.asp

There are plenty more but I won't list them, but for a full list of all web file extensions visit http://www.webopedia.com/quick_ref/fileextensionsfull.asp.

Edit: Posted before I knew he posted the above.