SEO Question

Rails
1

hi

how can google index rhtml files and links with in, since you dont have
them in public directory?

thank you

serz

2

It won’t index the .rhtml files, those are just views. It will however
index the results of those rhtml files based on your controller
actions. For example:

Your rhtml is:
app/views/blog/index.rhtml

Which typically would match to the following URL (that google will see)
http://yoursite.com/blog/index

This would be in your controller:
app/controllers/blog_controller.rb

Google sees the “output” of the rhtml via that url. I know it’s
confusing at first when you come from a non-MVC style programming
environment, but it doesn’t take too long to pick it up. A great book
is “Agile Web D. With Rails” which explains all of this and
more and is a great beginners guide. It helped me tremendously when I
was first learning.

Cheers,
John

3

Forgive my ignorance in this arena, but if the only public interface is
dispatch.[cgi|fcgi|rb] is Google (and other SE’s) able to see only the
generated http file output (in html format)?

So if they were to scan www.domain.com, they would be triggering the
dispatch.cgi action (through rails) which generates html output, which
then gets scanned by the SE ?

I always had it in my head that Google scans actual filenames, but as I
write this, I realize that can’t be the case, and that it is important
to have the layout file setup with proper meta-tags and title names
(among all the other SEO tips).

Thanks for talking me through this guys :slight_smile: No real reason to respond,
unless I’m way off base, or there’s extra detail that I’ve missed.

Thanks

Matt

4

matt wrote:

Forgive my ignorance in this arena, but if the only public interface is
dispatch.[cgi|fcgi|rb] is Google (and other SE’s) able to see only the
generated http file output (in html format)?

So if they were to scan www.domain.com, they would be triggering the
dispatch.cgi action (through rails) which generates html output, which
then gets scanned by the SE ?

I always had it in my head that Google scans actual filenames, but as I
write this, I realize that can’t be the case, and that it is important
to have the layout file setup with proper meta-tags and title names
(among all the other SEO tips).

Thanks for talking me through this guys :slight_smile: No real reason to respond,
unless I’m way off base, or there’s extra detail that I’ve missed.

Thanks

Matt

google sees the final output. Do this: Start up a rails app and
navigate to any of the pages in that app. Go to View->Source. That is
what google will see. Plain old HTML. Dont worry about the fcgi, cgi,
rhtml extensions, they get translated to plain HTML in the end.

–jake