"googled" database

**vrmartin** · Feb 5, 2005 21:55

Hi Folks,

Can a database, such as MySQL, be indexed by search engines such as Google and Yahoo? If no, can a database be made "searchable"?

Thanks.

Vanessa

**r937** · Feb 6, 2005 01:53

no, only a web site can be spidered, but the web site can of course be database-driven

what you need is a "site map" type of page which contains a link to every dynamic page

so even if you have a hundred products for sale but there's only one web template that produces a product page using database content, you can get each product spidered and into the search engine as long as there's a link to it somewhere that the spider can follow

**vrmartin** · Feb 9, 2005 02:34

Hi,

Can you give me the url of sites that have such site maps?

Thanks.

**r937** · Feb 9, 2005 05:31

i would if i knew of any, but i don't go looking at product sites very often

**deendee** · Feb 22, 2005 08:32

Spiders/Crawlers like GoogleBot will avoid Database driven site coz they can get trapped in an infinite loop (leading to your www-server crashing

).
The crawlers avoid links like http://www.sokobay.com/digdb?id=235. So you need to "trick" the spider to get it indexing your site, though DB driven
How?
You need to use mod_rewrite (an Apache module) to redirect query-stringed URLs to static-content URLs
e.g. http://www.sokobay.com/digdb?id=235 becomes http://www.sokobay.com/digdb/235

This is part of making your www search engine friendly.

Hope it helps

Ref: See Mod_rewrite Resources

**r937** · Feb 22, 2005 09:06

actually, the crawlers avoid links with session ids and other bumph in the url, but with a simple id, they spider those pages just fine

here are some counts using the "allinurl" option in google

allinurl:.asp?id= 50,100,000 results
allinurl:.cfm?id= 20,500,000 results
allinurl:.jsp?id= 5,360,000 results
allinurl:.php?id= wtf? hey guys, check this out