27.9. URLs Friendly to Search Engines

Search engines such as Google <http://www.google.com/> and All the Web <http://www.alltheweb.com/> attempt to explore the entire Web. They have become an essential resource for Internet users, and anyone who maintains a public site benefits from being listed. Search engines use robots, or spiders, to explore pages in a Web site, and they index PHP scripts the same way they index HTML files. When links appear in a page, they are followed. Consequently, the entire site becomes searchable.

Unfortunately, many robots do not follow links that appear to contain form variables. Links containing question marks may lead a robot into an endless loop, so they are programmed to avoid them. This presents a problem for ...

Get Core PHP Programming, Third Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.