The Wrong Approach
The Little Things

AJAX allows you to incorporate a lot of innovative site design characteristics. Some designers take the AJAX craze too far, however, by incorporating AJAX to a degree that it hurts their site's usability and accessibility. Here are a few of the most common problems.

Making it too simple. Designing sites where AJAX controls everything and serves content on a single page can be a search engine ranking disaster, as your website will have only one URL for everything. Instead, be sure to offer unique sub-links and URLs for popular site features.
Disabling browser controls. Since AJAX does not communicate with your browser's history, simple actions like hitting your browsers back and forward buttons are rendered useless. Although you may not traverse your website via browser buttons, many users do. Make sure you're not overdoing AJAX so much that users get lost in your website.
Not using Google's Webmaster Tools. These tools are a simply and reliable way to keep track of the pages of your website Google is indexing.
Cloaking

If Google cannot read the JavaScript components of your site, an obvious solution is to just provide an alternative readable version for Google, right? Wrong. Engaging in cloaking is a bad approach for making your AJAX website search engine friendly, because it is likely to get your site blacklisted and removed from Google's index entirely. Cloaking occurs when a developer creates two distinct versions of the same website, with the second version (usually plain HTML/text) only visible to search engine spiders. Spammers have long used the technique to hide popular phrases and links in the invisible content in order to artifically rank better in search engines, and Google has responded by banning these sites. To make sure Google doesn't confuse your site for one that's up to no good, make sure your crawlable site is derived from the same site your visitors are seeing...."

"Are PHP Session ID’s A Cause For Duplicate Content With Google?
June 22nd, 2007

I know certain web application depend on Session ID’s to handle unique user experience.

You know you’ve caught a case of Session ID’s when you’re browsing a site and your URL’s have nice random characters and number appended to it. Basically they are a real eyesore.

But more importantly, from what I understand Session IDs can create duplicate content issues for your website. You no longer have one page with one URL, but you can have thousands of unique URL pointing to one single page.

Google might crawl your site one day and pick up all your links with one session ID, and the next time they crawl they pick up a whole set of new links pointing to the same pages because the session ID has changed. That does suck!

Disabling PHP Session ID’s is not that complicated and there are a verity of tricks that can prevent search engines from picking them up. You can be simple and flip a global switch and turn off Session ID’s all together, or target the bots directly.

A few years ago I launched a site running OS Commerce and I had Session IDs enabled. Google did its thing and a few weeks later my results were a mess.

Now word on the street is that Google can handle Session ID’s much better then a few years ago. So is it worth ones time to even think about Session IDs’? I mean, with all those big brains working at the G-Factory you would think they could decipher Session ID’s.

Now I lean towards being better safe than sorry and I turn off my Session ID’s.

No Cookie, no Washy!"

Tim Perdue

 5 Search Engine Mistakes Not to Make
If you want to improve your search engine rankings, first fix these critical errors that can make your site invisible on the internet.
By Bill Treloar

People searching for your products or services on the Internet can be an important source of new customers for you. Because someone searching for what you sell is already "sold"? they're looking to buy. Where else can you find that kind of qualified sales lead?

Since most people give up on a search if they don't find what they're looking for in the first three pages of the search engine results, your web site needs to get ranked in those top three pages and the higher, the better.

But there are five common characteristics that can relegate even the most attractive and compelling site to the search engine hinterlands. Many nice-looking sites show up on page 72 of the search engine results instead of on page 1 or 2 because they make one or more of the following five critical mistakes.

1. Insufficient content. Your web site needs to have at least 200 words of keyword-rich text per page. Search engines determine what your web page is about based on the words you use on the page. A page that's mostly product photos may be very meaningful to someone shopping for those items. But the search engines have no way of understanding what's in those pictures, they need text content to do their jobs.

Your text needs to use the keywords that people will search for. If you're an exterminator and your site talks at length about "exterminators", "pest exterminators", "insect extermination", and "rodent infestation," the search engines will understand that your site is about those terms. But if someone searches for "pest control," your site won't show up unless you use that phrase on your site, too.

2. Use of frames. Creating frames is a technique that webmasters use to simplify their work and to help ensure a consistent appearance across all the pages of a web site. For example, your site designer may have created an outside "frame" for your page that has a top border with site identification, logos and so on. It may also have a left side border with links to the various pages on your site. And it may have a bottom border with contact information, a copyright statement and links to things like a privacy statement. In frames, the "meat" of the pages, where the real content is, is the area enclosed by those borders, and that's the only part that changes as you go from page to page.

Unfortunately, search engines may have difficulty moving around in a framed site and may fail to add all of your pages to their listings. And pages that are missed will never show up in the search engine results when people search for your keywords.

A more important problem occurs when the content pages do show up in the search engine results' pages. That's because when a searcher clicks on the link in the search engine results, it brings them to the content part of the page. Just the content part, which doesn't include the outside frame where site identification appears and where the links are that visitors need to find your contact information or the page where they can place an order. The simplest solution? Simply avoid using frames.

3. Graphics that include text. Because different visitors to your site have different fonts installed on their computers, the only way to ensure that the text on your web pages looks exactly as you want it, the size, font, line breaks and so on, is to include it in a graphic. And often such text looks really great.

Unfortunately, search engines can't tell if that graphic says "REALLY Cheap Widgets" or if it's a photo of your new puppy. Words in graphics are wasted on the search engines. In order to understand that your page is about "really cheap widgets," they need to find those words in plain text on your page.

In a similar fashion, navigation buttons that include words also can't be read by search engines. So what should you do? Include keywords in the links to pages on your site. This will help the search engines understand that those pages are relevant to those words. So either replace your navigation buttons with plain text links to the pages on your site, or supplement them with a redundant set of plain text links somewhere else on your page.

4. Dynamic content. Dynamic web pages are most often found on e-commerce sites that have numerous pages featuring hundreds of products. (Dynamic pages are constructed "on the fly" from a database of product information and can often be identified by the presence of a "?" somewhere in the page address.

Regrettably, dynamic pages are often ignored by search engines for a number of technical reasons. One way to fix this problem is to create topical pages that aren't dynamic. For example, you may sell many varieties of both tabletop widgets and portable widgets. By creating a static page (a "normal" web page that's not created by your database) for tabletop widgets and another for portable widgets, you can use your essential keywords on those pages and still link to your dynamic pages to display individual products. Your dynamic pages are unlikely to be seen by the search engines, but your static, topical pages describing your selection of tabletop and portable widgets should.

5. Insufficient link popularity. Almost all the major search engines factor into their rankings some measure of the number and quality of other sites that link to yours. That's a reflection of their belief that good web sites don't link to other web sites that are worthless.

If lots of high quality sites link to your site, the chances are that you have a better site than one without any incoming links. Of course, you might be comparing your well-established site to a brand new site no one knows about yet, but over time, it seems to work out that better sites have more incoming links. And all other things being equal, a site with a lot of incoming links will be ranked higher by the search engines than a site with fewer incoming links. And a site with no incoming links may be dropped entirely from some search engines.

Try to obtain links from web sites that complement yours but that don't compete with you. Investigate directories that list sites in your line of business. And be prepared to offer to link back to those sites in return for a link from them to you.

If you can refrain from making these 5 critical mistakes, you can avoid earning an abysmal search engine ranking. Being visible on the web is the first step to being found on the web. And while you may still need search engine optimization to obtain rankings in the top three pages of searches on your important keywords, you first need to make sure you're not condemned to page 72 by these five critical errors."

Wham Creative Group     http://www.whamcreative.com/content/5-search-engine-mistakes-not-to-make.html

To: "Charles Killian" <Charles at AlcatrazDesignGroup dot com>
From: "Opec Kemp ( Ozemail )" <okemp at ozemail dot com dot au>
Date: Thu, 5 Oct 2000 08:43:32 +1000
Cc: "PHP List" <php-general at lists dot php dot net>
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-----Original Message-----
>From: Charles Killian [mailto:Charles@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
>Sent: Thursday, October 05, 2000 8:28 AM
> To: php-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [PHP] search engines ignoring .php3 pages
>
>
> I know there has been a lot of talk about search engines and php pages but
> what is the latest consensus on php pages being ignored by search engines?
>
> Has anyone found this to be true:
>
> "Though each engine categorizes a site's content according its own unique
> algorithms, all
> search engines share the same flaw. They cannot handle dynamically
> loading pages, such as the ".php3" front door to your site, and will
> ignore links placed on such default pages."
>
> This is what a search engine placement company is claiming.
>
> Charles"

From: Zend the PHP Company

http://www.zend.com/lists/php-general/200010/msg00497.html