Posted by Sandy.Pittendrigh on 04/04/06 23:11

I think there is some confusion here about what I was proposing.
If you generate pages using the result of a mysql query, it is
tempting to use the numerical primary key of the page table
as the select criteria:

select * from my_pages where page_id=1
In order to make that query, the source page might
have a link like pagePainter.php?page_id=42
.....but that is a bad idea, because Google will cache that
link, and the relevant page_id changes each time the database
is reloaded.

If the database search key was made from a string,
where that string was the 'logical' server-side file path,
then it would still be just as unique as a primary key,
but it would not change each time the database was
reloaded.

However, and this was my question, sort of:
some search engines (is this true?) don't like to index
what look like dynamic links. Google does, I'm not
sure they all do. One way to guarantee indexing
is to produce static html (from a database) rather
than dynamic html.

Andy Jeffries (I think) showed me how to pass
a string GET parameter (a long path string) that
I could use as in mysql query (just like a page_id)
that would not look to search engines like a dynamic link.

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