NYCPHP Meetup

[Rick]

inforequest wrote:
>
>
> Rick rick-at-napalmriot.com |nyphp dev/internal group use| wrote:
>
>> It's the webserver that is configured to look for default-index 
>> files, such as index.html, and not search engines.  Search engines 
>> only attempt to access valid resources, such as the "fake" resource 
>> you mentioned (which is quite valid and not fake at all).
>>
>> -- 
>> Rick
>> http://www.sensual.jp
>
>
> (Top-posting requires top-posting... sorry Michael.)
>
> Yes, technically correct -- it is the webserver. BUT, to the 
> traditional search engine, the URL defines the resource. Every unique 
> URL is potentially a unique resource, and ideally they are all tested 
> and included in the index if unique.
>
> As webmaster, in the eyes of the indexing search spider, you have 
> defined your "site" by the URL structure you used to define the 
> resources, and not by the content (regardless of how that content is 
> served... by the web server or your PHP scripts). So it becomes 
> important to control the URL even more carefully than the content in 
> many cases.
>
> This is now changing, as we move away from URL as defining name/label 
> (ajax, etc). If semantic web were more advanced, it might work, but 
> for now, it's a good thing we only have one search engine because its 
> behavior is slowly becoming less standardized and more customized over 
> time (that was sarcasm.... a little).
>
> -=john andrews
John:

You are correct in saying that the URL defines the resource, and the 
"permanence" (I use that loosely) is quite important really.  The way I 
translated the question was more or less along the lines of, "say I have 
this resource, which looks like a folder, is it going to look for an 
index.html file?"

In the case of my answer, no.  The search engines are not going to try 
to guess the default resource to go to in the event of something that 
appears to be a folder.  They merely go where they're told, and they 
follow (usually) a number of rules along the way.

Now then, as I understand it (please correct me if I'm wrong, John... as 
I'm actually curious), if you move a resource to a new location, you 
should provide the proper headers to do so (I believe 302 for 
permanently moved, but I don't use it enough to know off the top of my 
head), than most intelligent search engines are aware of the change.  
Moving resources should be fairly painless, in that regard.

As far as AJAX is concerned, that's a touchy subject with me.  I try to 
make sure that anything I'm serving via AJAX is more-or-less personal to 
the person requesting it, say a message list or friends list or 
something, directly related to the person.  There's always elegant 
fallbacks, and what I tend to use AJAX for (I am using AJAX as a synonym 
of a XMLHttpRequest object, as opposed to anything else which would be 
correct) is personal data related to the user currently logged in that 
isn't important to be indexed.


I intended to write a bit more, I have to deal with some other issues I 
wasn't expecting so I'll leave it at that :(