The solution to this dynamic URL problem has been discussed widely in search engine forums and solutions have been bandied about including software provided by SEO's, URL re-write techniques for dynamic pages on APACHE servers http://www.alistapart.com/articles/urls/ and PHP pages http://www.stargeek.com/php-seo.php to generate search engine friendly URL's. Others recommend simply adding static HTML sitemap pages as alternatives for search engine spiders.

In this instance client's developer simply said "I can't do that (PHP solution) on this server". So we resorted to putting up static HTML sitemap pages with hard-coded URLS to main 54 pages of site at http://lawfirm411.com/Law-Firm-411-sitemap.html This should get at least those fifty pages crawled by Googlebot, but Googles' spider appears not to be crawling this site at all.

How do we know this? See for yourself by using following query in search box at Google: allinurl:www.lawfirm411.com where result page shows ONE page in results. If you try that query on your own site (replace your own domain name for lawfirm411.com), you'll see results lists ALL your pages.

The site home page was crawled by Google four months ago, when they took their "Cached Snapshot" of page. You can see this by visiting Google cached page here: http://66.102.7.104/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=U TF-8&q=cache:www.lawfirm411.com where date of this snapshot is "Apr 20, 2004 07:42:19 GMT" and they haven't been back since. The page in that snapshot has none of newly added links, an outdated title tag, and old content.

This problem is not unique to this site. One client we worked with two years ago had a dynamically generated, framed site! Those two site structures have always given search engines trouble. Their site was not crawled at all and only front page showed up. Our solution was to create a second domain (owned by client), which had static HTML pages that precisely mirrored content of client's framed, dynamically generated site. Guess what happened after Googlebot crawled static site? Google indexed framed site in full and then banned static site from index!

Not an approach we advocate, but one that worked for this client.

We're still searching for ways to get Googlebot back to LawFirm411.com before creating that new static site, but decided to share this odd experience with SEO community before going to any extremes. Google provides over 70% of most search engine referred traffic to ALL of our clients and we realized we can't site idly by and see a major client languish because Googlebot didn't like what it found at client site on first visit four months ago.

This issue dogs newer sites in other places as well. The Open Directory Project has also become notoriously slow in adding new sites to directory and in this case, has not picked up this site even after 6 regular monthly submissions. The web playing field may have begun tilting toward older, established sites and away from new ones.

Google

Google has a beta personalized search engine at: http://labs.google.com/personalized/profile.html that is pretty interesting to test. You're told to click on Health, then General Health checkbox and search for "stanford." When searching for word "bob" instead of "stanford" at Minimum Personalize setting first three results are "Bob Builder," "Bob Marley" and "Bob Dylan". The rest of this page has no health related information on it as well. But, when slider is pulled to Maximum Personalize, "Dr. Bob" has first two positions followed other results mentioned above. Its obvious Google has a ways to go in developing this.

Personal Privacy

If personalized search is to succeed, then personal privacy issues need to be addressed and concerns held to a minimum. Will personalized search involve searching your hard drive to see what your interests are? Will your interests be stored in a cookie on your computer? What happens when multiple users share a computer - will someone else get hit with all sorts of Preparation H advertisements because of hemorrhoid treatment searches you wanted to keep private? And will children be affected by adult personalized searches?

These are all questions that SE's need to address so that people do not feel that their privacy is being violated or put at risk. The more control and choice user has over personalized search more likely it has in succeeding for search engines.

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