Hello - I have a major db of fish species that I would like search engines to visit when a search is requested for a specific species. Example: If you go to Google and put in "trout suppliers" it will return 100's of pages but the first always contain several db's with their (being the db owners) specific listings given for the current search. Tradekey, buyerzone, alibaba, esources, etc. My site has a major db for the industry but it is not searched by individual species. You must manually go to my search page & select the species wanted. I know this is an automatic process on the other sites as they have over 3,000,000 categories and do not believe they are dynamic pages. What can I do to enable the search engines to make those same individual searches of my db?

Thanks for the help.

Search engines cannot index a database.

They index the pages of HTML code and content generated by a script. That script gets the data from the database, and the URL of the HTML page determines what data is retrieved from the database.

Another part of the script generates the index pages, pages that list all the categories and which generate the on-page links that users click on to get to the content pages.

My assumption is that I would have to write a script to run through my db and generate HTML and then link those pages on my site so the ggogle crawler could see them and index them. While making everything available for the searches, this would also allow someone to take the whole db once it is in HTML?

I am wondering if the other db's such as Tradekey, buyerzone, alibaba, esources, etc. are exposed that way or am I missing something.

The engines are not goign through the databases at those places - the sites themselves have made many, many html pages available with all their products listed so engines can scan them.

In short, the engines will not "ask a question" like humans do when searching the database you have.

When a spider sees your db query form, it moves on. You need to make pages showcasing each of the items in the database and link them together (like a regular website) so the spiders can crawl from page to page/product to product - it's those pages that get indexed.

Thank you gentlemen for taking the time to clarify this for me. The object was to increase traffic volume. We are considering a script to do this but also have now begun to look at web 2.0 changes ie; wiki and blog additions which will probably generate more useful traffic leaving our db secure.

Thank you