[ic] IC and search engines

[interchange-users@interchange.redhat.com (Mike Heins)]

Quoting cfm@maine.com (cfm@maine.com):
> On Wed, Feb 27, 2002 at 07:34:54PM -0500, sphen boyle wrote:
> > has anyone figured out a way to trick search engines into ranking the 
> > interchange pages?  looking at past logs, we used to get a lot of people 
> > finding us at google and other search engines, and ever since we started 
> > using interchange, our orders have gone down and our rankings have 
> > disappeared.  i would think that this would be a very important issue 
> > regarding interchange.  any ideas would be great.
> 
> There are all sorts of ways.  Most of them will depend on your web server,
> not on IC.  Search the mailing list archives for rewrite.
> 

One way that works real well is to link Google into your individual
product pages. Experience has shown that if the product description is
in the <title>, it gets ranked higher when that is the search term.

(NOTE: Google's link-based algorithms sometimes make all this moot.
This method really worked well back in the days of Altavista; sometimes
my clients would be a consistent 1-3 at Altavista when searching for
a particular product.)

Make a page that does a single line link to each product:

i.e.

        [loop search="
                fi=products
                st=db
                ra=yes
		ml=10000
                "]
        <A HREF="http://__SERVER_NAME____CGI_URL__/[loop-code].html";>
                [loop-field description]
	</A><br>
        [/loop]

Save this to a file, then make it available to Google to index. Voila!
Repeat as you add new products -- you can even automate it via
cron if you want.

-- 
Red Hat, Inc., 3005 Nichols Rd., Hamilton, OH  45013
phone +1.513.523.7621      <mheins@redhat.com>

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