I have often pondered why most of my website’s pages don’t show up in Google searches. I thought it must have something to do with using a content management portal (PHPNuke), and/or with how the URLs are formed. Well, I was right…
The basic problem seems to be that robots like Google’s webcrawler don’t follow URLs that don’t have “normal” URL construction. So, they’ll go follow a link to “https://www.kgadams.net”, but not “https://www.kgadams.net/modules.php?content=blahblah”. What to do?
Well, naturally, I’m not the only person running a PHPNuke based site who wants to see their pages listed in Google. So someone else has solved this problem previously, with a little set of changes to to PHPNuke and using the Apache web server module “mod_rewrite”. The solution is called “Googletap“, and I’ve implemented it here on a test basis.
Google scans my site about once a week. In theory, they should pick up the new content from my site by this time next week…from what I’ve seen, it will be in their indexes a couple of days after that. I’m curious to see what difference, if any, being properly listed in Google’s search engine makes to the traffic here. So…look at the little counter on the left of the main page here. Its at 17,319 as I write this, and has been going up by about 1,500 hits a month.