6 replies to this topic

[anews]

Hi!

There is one thing that I could not find on the web... I have some dynamically generated pages (php) hidden as ordinary static HTML pages (for instance, if you go to http://www.mysite.co...den/shovel.html I will serve you http://www.mysite.co...duct.php?id=34). No problem here. BUT - the cache headers give me away. I still want to track visits and I want every visitor to come to my page for the content (I don't want proxies to handle the requests by themselves). Is this a problem with search engines? Do they rank according to cache headers?

Thank you! You run a very nice forum!

Anze

[Scottie]

Not exactly sure what you mean by ranking according to cache headers... if you'll view the source of this page you'll see cache headers and we rank just fine!

Some will tell you we are really rank, too...

Welcome to the forum!

[anews]

That was fast!

I quote Google's guidelines:

Make sure your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP header. This feature allows your web server to tell Google whether your content has changed since we last crawled your site. Supporting this feature saves you bandwidth and overhead.

Is it possible that Google "favors" the sites that allow caching on the grounds that the site that is allowed to be cached is "more static" than the one that isn't? It would be logical, because the '?' character doesn't tell much about the static/dynamic nature of the page, but dynamic pages are usually not cached while the static ones usually are...

As for the ranking of this site - sure it ranks high, but with such content...

Thanks!

Anze

[Scottie]

Hey Anze-

The If-Modified-Since HTTP header is different from cache settings; it just saves them from spidering content that hasn't changed.

Cache vs nocache only tells Google whether or not they are allowed to display your cached pages to viewers. Either way, they still crawl and index the page in their database.

Is that answering your question?

[anews]

Hi, thanks for the answer!

Actually, I was talking about the headers that the server sends to the client when the client wants a page - "Cache-Control: must-revalidate" and the like... Google content caching has nothing to do with it. Google could differentiate between more and less "changeable" content based on these headers - if we allow proxies and browsers to cache pages, we send a signal that the page doesn't change that often, but the question is: does it? More on caching: http://www.mnot.net/cache_docs/.

Also, does Google penalize the pages that end with .html, but have a header that clearly says that the content was PHP-generated? Does it care about extension (.html, .php)? I can "hide" PHP pages in .html URLs (using mod_rewrite), but I want to make sure it won't backfire - the site I am building is not big, but it makes my life much easier if it is dynamic. And search-engines friendliness is a big factor, so I am using all of the techniques that are supposed to help - friendly design, no dirty hacks, descriptive titles,... But this issue - well, I found no info whatsoever on the Internet. Hope someone can help... (not just with Google, does anyone have info on Trident Precision Rank?)

Thanks & enjoy!

Anze

[Scottie]

I wouldn't bother hiding .php extensions- every site I build is in .php and I've never had a problem getting them indexed. At the last SES conference. a Google representative stated that the page extension doesn't make any difference to them.

As to whether or not Google pays attention to cache headers... you've gone beyond my limited field of knowledge! I can tell you we don't allow the browsers to cache the pages here in order to make sure the content is current. Someone else will probably chime in with an opinion before long.

[anews]

Thanks for the answer! I'll stick to the .php extension and make my application "if-modified-since"-friendly then...

No harm in being nice anyway.

Anze