Thnks.

Im on a virtually hosted account, and all I have at my disposal is a custom 404 page. I have been told that a 404 page can be used to somehow accomplish the elimination of ?'s in the url. If it's possible to do this on a virtual account, how is it done?

I have also read that you may somehow generate static pages... how would this be implemented? Would I have to write up a script that writes a page? Would I use File.System Object? By the way Im on a NT system.

Thanks Gary

Although it's ugly, and it's #20 in Lycos under "Web Sites" for the term "game software" (no quotes used), I'm choosing this as an example:
http://www.4software.com/onlinegamesoftware.htm

I chose this because Lycos is particularly susceptible to doorway pages, and doesn't collapse web sites into one listing (clustering) like AltaVista. When clustering occurs, it's difficult to know which doorway page made your domain inherit relevancy.

In the Lycos responses, I went down past where directory locations were listed along with the sites, because those pages are probably scoring well because of good directory listings. Hence, this is a good Lycos doorway page (although it's only 20th position). To find better non-engine-specific doorway examples, search with Ixquick to find top-10 intersections (probably quite tricky). I went right for Lycos because of how easy it is to interpret reasons for positions. I'm interested in any doorway pages people find this way.

[This message has been edited by JuniorHarris (edited 09-06-2001).]

[This message has been edited by JuniorHarris (edited 09-07-2001).]

[This message has been edited by NetRodent (edited 02-26-2000).]

They will get to you once you submit.

http://gazetteworld.com is a database repository of all past issues. The URL's to an individual issue are longer than my arm and very unfriendly to email, forums and spiders.

To overcome that I create an html page for each issue and add it to a hallway page.
http://gazetteworld.com/html/

That is the page I submit to the engines and they like it just fine.

One thing you must do is to use the full URL for all links back into the database system index so that people come initially to the HTML version but their next click moves them over to the database archives.

Click around in the and you'll see what I mean. Also, there is a more complete answer to this problem in one of the recent issues.

This is the same technique to create the spider friendly pages needed by these Forums.
http://searchengineforums.com/HTMLsummary/summarypage.html

[This message has been edited by Jim (edited 01-22-2001).]

I would suggest doing some research and creating pages that include elements of what works in doorways with pages that contain content.

One element the example ugly page seems to not have. The innerText of links carry alot of points with some search engines. word density of that link text does make an impact.

Thank you for explaining with an example (Better than 1000 words!).

Your hallway though requiring manual creation and maintenance seems appropriate If all I want to let the crawler see is one level. In our site, we have a product categorization which is sometimes 7 levels deep and we want the search engines to index pages/words at each level. Following your hallway example would pretty much end up with us generating a static site, wouldn't it ?