Re: [ic] Meta Tags

["Jonathan Clark" <jonc@webmaint.net>]

>Does anyone know if meta tags setup on the product pages will be indexed by
>most robots in search engines?  Looking for the most effective way to
manage
>meta tags with interchange.
>

I suppose the question really is: Will robots be able to access the product
pages?

For the broadest possible audience of robots you should consider the
following:

support for frames and image maps is patchy.

most robots will ignore any arguments after the page name. So a page
/cgi-bin/foo/page.html?arg=foo2
would be accessed as /cgi-bin/foo/page.html

some extensions may be ignored (.cgi, .pl, etc)

some robots will avoid a path with cgi-bin in it.

Also bear in mind that meta tags are _not_ the be all and end all of getting
good rankings, or even indexing.
- in fact they are ignored by some search engines (Excite, FAST, Google,
Lycos, NLight) (Excite - keywords only ignored)
imho page titles and the content are far more important

The way ic accesses pages within its space is good from a search engine
point of view (/cgi-bin/foo/page.html as apposed to
/cgi-bin/prog.cgi?page=foo).

The other thing, though, is that there is a robot limit set in ic (default
50 I think). How many of your product pages are actually going to be
spidered?

Our strategy is to alias the cgi-bin as /sales/ and make part of the site
static html outside of ic with product overviews which are content rich (and
may include meta tags). The ic part would run to maybe a thousand flypages
and so only a small number will ever get spidered.

hope this helps


Jonathan
Webmaint.com

PS. for information on the workings of search engines I recommend
searchenginewatch.com
Some of the info is subscription but this is not expensive and worth it
imho.



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