Posted by Sandy Pittendrigh on 04/04/06 15:54

I have a how-to-do-it manual like site,
related to fishing. I want to add a new
interactive question/comment feature to each
instructional page on the site.

I want (registered) users to be able to add
comments at the bottom of each page, similar
to the way the php, mysql, apache manuals work.

PUNCHLINE_A:
I don't want to revert to a system of dynamic links
that look like "pagePainter.php?page_id=123"

I did that for a while. But every time I edited
the site (reloaded the database) all the page_ids
changed, and then voila I had stale links spattered
all over my Google search results--because the
same page now had a slightly different page_id.

To avoid that I could associate each page with
a unique lookup string that is its server-side file path:

pagePainter.php?page_key=/pages/manual/chapter1/engine_repair/carburetors

Then the keys wouldn't change everytime I added a few new pages
to the system, and reloaded the database. Then my Google search
links would remain constant.

PUNCHLINE_B:
Will the search engines spider and index links that look like that?
Or will I have to make a system that spits out the entire page as static
html, each time a registered user adds a new page question or comment?

Or should I put the comments box in an iframe, which is also a spidering
can of worms?

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