Mambo and Search Engine ranking

**Quentin** · 17-06-05

Hi another annoying newbie post! I have had a look in the forum and can not find the answer to this please let me know if it has already been covered and appologies.

I am trying to build a site using Mambo. As well as other links I will be using the Paid on Results templates with data feeds to merchant's programmes that I have joined.

I am setting my menus up so that they link straight to the URL that Paid On Results has given me for my templates (the templates then show up on my site when the menu link is clicked). Does any one know how this will affect my Google and other search engine rankings? Will the "spiders" read and index these pages or ignore them?

Is there a better way of doing this?

I have also read some posts about mod_rewrite but I am not sure how this all works. Should I try and learn this and change the links so that they are more easily picked up by search engines?

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks

**wowsers** · 20-06-05

Hi,
I think that the Mambo Global site settings panel contains an option to convert hieroglyphic php urls into something slightly more search engine friendly just with a click.

**wowsers** · 20-06-05

"I am setting my menus up so that they link straight to the URL that Paid On Results has given me for my templates (the templates then show up on my site when the menu link is clicked). Does any one know how this will affect my Google and other search engine rankings? Will the "spiders" read and index these pages or ignore them?"

Sorry should have included this with the other post:
I am certainly no expert but imho I think that your sight would be mainly invisible if I understand your proposal correctly. I don't think you would get the pages indexed by google.Also won't your site then appear to just consist of off site links ie: a link farm or are you hosting your own content articles etc?

As I say, I don't know much, it's just my initial thoughts...

**wowsers** · 20-06-05

oops,
sight should read site, in above message.
I'm off to bed my heads in the shed. :-)

**Quentin** · 20-06-05

Thanks Wowsers. Looks like you were having a late (or early) one!

I am going to be including content on other pages and there will be some of my own text on the Paid On Results templates. The templates will appear in the middle of the mambo page. The contents of the templates will be directly viewable within the mambo page. Is that a link farm? Will the content of these templates not be picked up by search engines because of this? Would it be better to create by own page of content e.g. introducing the products and then set up a link that pulls up the Paid on Results template or not use these templates at all?

To improve the links were you referring to the page under global configuration called SEO? For search engine URLs it is has a message saying Warning for Apache only! Rename HTaccess.text to .htaccess before activating. I know this is probably very obvious but I am not using apache per say (that I know of) but my host offers apache in the hosting control panel. Do I need to worry about this? If so does the above mean I should call the file htaccess.htaccess? or just .htaccess? I always thought a file had a name folded by its type so I guess it means htaccess.htaccess but htaccess does not look like a name of a file type? I just do not want to mess up any important files!

Thanks for your help.

**wowsers** · 20-06-05

Hi,
When I say I'm no expert I really mean that. Please backup any site content before making any modifications, especially if based on something I've written :-) Regarding the htaccess file - just rename the file .htaccess if you check the seo option in the global site config ( you were right with guessing what I 'mean't) Depending on your hosting this will either help or not. By that I mean a site I have with claranet just ceases to work yet sites I have with supanames.co.uk are all ticketyboo. Any problems just rename the file back to it's original htaccess.txt and that should be ok BUT back up first!

As for the templates hosted somewhere else. I'm not really qualified to give you a good answer maybe someone else will oblige. All I can say is that from my limited understanding I think that search bots like simple structured sites that include things like <h1></h1>, <h2></h2>, etc,etc Pictures are largely invisible to them ( yeah ok someones going to say about 'longdescript' and 'alt') as are 'frame' based sites but maybe it would be useful to down load something like 'lynx' text browser and view your site with that to see how it kinda looks to crawlers?

**Paul Wright** · 21-06-05

There are 2 modules available for mambo that are much better than the defualt sef urls.

404sef by m2k - free
sef advance by sakic (core developer of mambo) - 40 euros

i can strongly recommend using either of those as this will put you in complete control over your visible urls and you won't be restricted to the article/menu titles in the url as with the default. This also provides anl oppertunity to load up your site with additional keywords rather than just repeating the same ones.

cheers
Paul.

**Quentin** · 21-06-05

Wowsers and Paul thanks for your advice. Paul I will check out these bits of software.

What I am doing at the moment I think was called wrapping (also Iframes?). Which sounds as if it is not Search engine friendly. Sounds like this software might have a better method.

Thanks