Just been sat here pondering the issues we'll have when the new version of short-story.net goes live.

Every single page will be Perl generated, but the strings after the '?' are quite short. Any advice as to whether the site will be indexed by Google ok?

If you take a look at beta.short-story.net you'll see the basic structure etc.

google the term: mod rewrite

i set ours up a while ago and dont have any of the links i used. i do remember that alot of the SEO help pages had scripts that generate mod_rewrite functions for you. basically you set up an .htaccess file to 'rewrite' your question marks into a search engine friendly URL. when we first put up our dynamic site, all the search engines hated us. after applying the mod_rewrite, google indexed ALL our dynamic pages.

good luck!
:-)
dems

cheers for the tip I'll have to look into that!

Check out this tutorial...

http://www.chroder.com/archives/2004...urls-with-php/

--James

****... just been told the site will have to move over to a Windows server... the current hosting contract is up

any ideas on something similar for Windows rather than apache?

ugh... IIS is not going to do as good a job as Apache... if it was my decision, i would login to the server remotely (RDC) and setup Apache on it. Thats how i have my local server at home... windows box with apache webserver.

not an answer to your question, but a semi-decent workaround.

good luck!
dems

Google is actually friendlier than most when it comes to indexing dynamic pages... I'd be much more concerned about all the other engines...

Google seems to be coping ok with the current dynamic pages (although half of the less important ones only appear as a URL without title or description).

Surprisingly, Yahoo are indexing quite a few dynamic pages (mostly YaBB related) from the site, and coping fine with them!

For some reason MSN only has the main page indexed...none of the other pages show up (html OR perl).

Do you think I should just leave as is for now, and see how it goes?

I have never had problems with Google indexing my dynamic pages, but I still changed them to search engine friendly pages any way because of other search engines.