8 Replies Latest reply on Jun 14, 2007 1:41 PM by monkeyden

    Search Engines and Seam

    trickyvail

      I am confused about the use of .seam as a web page file extension and the behavior of internet search engines in relation to this file extension. Would it be more conservative to use a jsf or jsp extension?

        • 1. Re: Search Engines and Seam
          christian.bauer

          I don't think thats a relevant scoring factor anymore.

          • 2. Re: Search Engines and Seam
            trickyvail

            I created a website with the .seam extension but found that although my site was indexed by Google and Yahoo, it was not cached. I changed the extension for seam pages to .html and then Google and Yahoo no longer indexed the site at all. Because the jsf components render xhtml elements I think maybe the engines are " unhappy" with the use of the .html extension (although MSN works fine). At the moment I'm going back to the .seam extension. Please share your experiences and insights in this regard. Thank you.

            • 3. Re: Search Engines and Seam
              reind

               

              "trickyvail" wrote:
              Because the jsf components render xhtml elements I think maybe the engines are " unhappy" with the use of the .html extension (although MSN works fine).


              That's probably not a concern. Just use .html or .xhtml extension as you like and specify the correct DOCTYPE.

              • 4. Re: Search Engines and Seam
                christian.bauer

                I would be very very surprised if caching is dependent on some string in the URL. It should only depend on the HTTP headers and DOCTYPE.

                • 5. Re: Search Engines and Seam
                  trickyvail

                  Does this sound like a plausible explanation for the search engine behavior?

                  Seam-gen creates an index.html page that contains:

                  <html>
                  <head>
                   <meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; URL=home.seam">
                  </head>
                  </html>


                  Search engine retrieves this page, caches it and then proceeds to index and cache the home.seam page. The root page for your domain ends up being a blank page.

                  Possible solution? Edit server/default/deploy/jbossweb-tomcat55.sar/conf/web.xml
                  <welcome-file-list>
                   <welcome-file>home.seam</welcome-file>
                   </welcome-file-list>



                  • 6. Re: Search Engines and Seam
                    trickyvail

                    I've tried the above with both home.seam and home.xhtml as the target welcome page but with no success. Maybe because the server tries to access the file directly rather than letting seam intercept the file by extension?

                    Solution attempt 2 - create a robots.txt file that directs the search engines to the correct root page for the site (home.seam).

                    • 7. Re: Search Engines and Seam
                      trickyvail

                      Previously I stated that search engines were not caching pages, but it would be more accurate to state that they were caching blank pages (sorry for the imprecision).

                      It seems that robots.txt can only be used to define areas to not visit, so that won't work either.

                      Currently I'm thinking about the following approach:

                      <html>
                       <head>
                       <meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0; URL=home.seam">
                       <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">
                       </head>
                      </html>
                      (Tell the search engine to follow the redirecting index.html page, but not to index it.)

                      Ideally though, I would like to have JBoss load my home.seam page by default, rather than load an index.html page with a redirect. Is this something that is possible and how do you configure JBoss to do this?

                      Thank you for everyone's help.

                      • 8. Re: Search Engines and Seam
                        monkeyden

                        If "home.seam" worked in the welcome file list, then the server would essentially be restarting the request, since at that point you've already passed the URI parsing facility of the server. The welcome file list can't be anything that requires a request URI mapping in web.xml.