One of the frustrating things about running a website these days is that there are so many other websites out there. I mean, no matter the subject, the chances are that you will be competing for your readers’ attention with a vast number of other sites.

So it is with this site. Whilst I stand firm in my belief that we are unique in what we do and our philosophy (at least as applied to our industry) it’s fair to say that we are not the only choice. There are other sites. Which means that we need to be prominent in the search engines as word-of-mouth recommendations can only go so far.

Google is the current market leader in search engine technology. It is important to be listed in the Google listings, though these days it’s not always a question of merit or relevancy but one of how much money you’re willing to pay Google. This creates a bit of an unlevel playing field, especially when a non-commercial site such as this must compete against big sites with sizeable advertising budgets.

Whether Google is just in breaking away from relevancy- and meritocratic-based search results is a subject I’ll mentally file away for a future discussion, but the fact remains that we must be as clever as we can be to ensure a clean and consistent match between search terms and our site.

I discovered recently that Google no longer guarantees to spider (and hence catalogue) sites with a lot of dynamic content. This basically applies to the custom-written community software that we use. Apparently, Google will skip dynamic pages and this means that much of our valuable content isn’t ‘visible’ to the world at large (who use the Google-based search).

This is a shame as it is this very content that might make all the difference to how someone in (say) Boston goes about running her call centre. If our extremely relevant topic doesn’t appear in the Google search results, she will not be able to find what we’ve got to offer. This is A Bad Situation.

So, it was with some trepidation and a degree of Geek Kudos that I set about creating an alias-system for dynamic web pages such as we use here. Basically, a way of handling static-like URLs and extracting from them the bits we need to deliver dynamic content. For the technically minded, I created an ISAPI URL Rewriter filter in Visual C++ which looks for particular ‘virtual’ urls and does the hard work, translating from seemingly static URLs (e.g. vtopic_4739.htm) to (hidden) dynamic URLs (e.g. topic.asp?threadid=4739).

Now, with this in place, you might find that the urls of topics appear a bit different in places. Don’t worry, the old dynamic way of addressing content remains, but now we have a way to present our discussion content to search engines in a way that they will be ready, able and willing to spider.

End result? Hopefully better Google visibility resulting in more new members bringing fresh ideas. Can’t be bad, can it?

John

PS. As I write this, I’ve modified a number of the listings’ pages (e.g. latest posts, unified view, etc.) to use this new static shorthand. However, for latest posts, I have still got some work to do to ensure that it all falls more neatly into place. Hopefully once I get back from Prague, I’ll get this done.