Site Article Indexing

Because many search engine Web sites such as Google do not properly index Web sites that use database queries, I have changed the linking structure to the articles on the SMO.net. The solution, provided by Andrew Penry, did not require any major programming feats... but the changes will make the URL addresses of articles change.

Before this upgrade the address to any article on this site looked like this: www.shawnolson.net/articles.php?article_id=216. The problem was that all of the articles on this site are located at www.shawnolson.net/articles.php and the articles.php script uses the "article_id=216" to decide what information to pull from the database... which search engines ignore.

Andrew's solution was to "trick" the search engine into thinking that each article on the SMO.net resides in a directory... when in fact there is no articles directory. To access the article in the axample above, the new address is www.shawnolson.net/a/216. By writing an HTACCESS file in our script directory, we create virtual directories.

There were some linking errors from some of the pages immediately after the upgrade. Most of those errors have been fixed. If you happen to find one, please let me know of the error.