How do you do this!!!!??

They have: 2 posts

Joined: Dec 2003

Hello everyone!

I am new to this group but have been lurking for a while. Haven't really seen any questions like this before so here goes:

I have a website that has say products and each product has a detail page that gets filled in from a database.

The detail page is .asp that receives one parameter to get details.

HERE'S THE KICKER:

I look at my competition and their pages all appear to be static and indeed after using an import program to download their site I find that the pages are not only static but each product has its own file ie whatever.com/product123/index.htm

This leads me to believe that they are somehow generating full pages and file structure dynamically. BUT HOW?!?!?

The search engines love, love, love their pages and my site has gone from top 10 to 99999999. This may be due to other factors but I can't help but think this has something to do with my current situation.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!!

Suzanne's picture

She has: 5,507 posts

Joined: Feb 2000

1. search engines follow query strings, but it's probably better to give them straight urls that people can remember.

2. URL Mapping is most likely what they are doing, not using static files. In this way, it appears to be static, but is from a database.

Busy's picture

He has: 6,151 posts

Joined: May 2001

when you download their site (which you shouldn't anyway) even if called from database your only seeing the end results not the page makeup

like this page your seeing now, it's a .php file which would have a few database queries and if/else statements among many others but if you look at the source you'd only see the html side of it, same as when you downloaded the sites files.

They have: 2 posts

Joined: Dec 2003

When I download my own site all I get is the template pages that the database fills when asked to. These other sites have files with actual static HTML pages.

I'm wondering if even though they allow users to enter data through a form if someone in the background is getting the form in their email and then going to the page and making the change manually. Is there a way through PHP or javascript to generate pages?

I promise not to download someone's site and then copy it!

He has: 296 posts

Joined: May 2002

They may have their webserver set to accept *.html and *.htm files as PHP files. In apache you modify the httpd.conf file to do that. Or, like Suzanne said they may use URL mapping.

[James Logsdon]

He has: 6 posts

Joined: Dec 2003

Rewrite tool does this. Apache has support built in I believe. IIS rewrite can be added through 3rd party software.

-Mike

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