PostNuke

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Easy trick for making Post-Nuke search friendly

Contributed by Anonymous on Oct 26, 2001 - 11:42 PM

My front page got spidered by google, but I really doubt it got to the second, third, etc., which certainly would get me more hits--the links to the next pages are at the very bottom of the page. So I came up with this little trick for making your pages easier on that spider.




Just make an html copy of the pages you think are most important for search engines to hit--these can be second, third, etc. pages with NPN news, articles in your sections, whatever. Go to the page with your browser, View/source, copy it all, drop it in your favorite html editor (maybe you want to edit out the date since you won't be updating this every day--and a small question here: since you will be updating these pages weekly at most, should you change the "update" instruction for the search spider for these pages to say, 7 days instead of 1 day?).




These pages are no good just being there if the search spider doesn't find them. In you theme (toplinks.php for me since I just edited the Post-Nuke one), make some invisible links to these html pages. I did this by linking them with invisible gifs that were really tiny. That way, the spider sees that the very first three or four links it should go spider from your site are nice, easy html pages, and it goes to these instead of about 500 links (including 'read more, comments,' etc) with all these difficult php extensions, probably missing the most important content you have.




If people surf into these pages, they won't be completely up-to-date of course, but every link should work on them, and the links simply redirect them back your main site. And of course, these html pages load up a lot faster than your normal php pages since the processor doesn't have anything fancy to do.




Nice for getting more hits, nice for drop-by visitors that find you, and you're making the spider's life a lot easier.




Each time you want to update these html pages, it's a little batch work of cutting and pasting, but it shouldn't take more than 3 minutes to update three of these pages.




You can go to http://webreach.hostnuke.com (Project Webreach for Peace) and 'view source' to see how I did this; comments appreciated (as I know little about search engines, though PWP is #3 right now for peace islaam on Google!).
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