Servlets and Search Engine-Friendly URLs

[msenin]

Hi.

I've website built with JSPs, and it's 99% dynamic content. So I have a
lot of URLs with parameters, e.g.
http://myserver.com/servlet/myServlet?parm1=value1&parm2=value2

etc., but search engines/spiders, such as Google would not index such
links.

So I am trying to somehow mask/transform those URLs so that they appear
to spiders as static pages, e.g.

http://myserver.com/go/servlet/myServlet/parm1-value1.parm2-value2.html

Thanks!

p.s.
I am using TomCat as a standalone web server.

 

[SMC]

Hi.

I've website built with JSPs, and it's 99% dynamic content. So I have a
lot of URLs with parameters, e.g.
http://myserver.com/servlet/myServlet?parm1=value1&parm2=value2

etc., but search engines/spiders, such as Google would not index such
links.

So I am trying to somehow mask/transform those URLs so that they appear
to spiders as static pages, e.g.

http://myserver.com/go/servlet/myServlet/parm1-value1.parm2-value2.html

Thanks!

p.s.
I am using TomCat as a standalone web server.

You need a controller servlet (which could be a JSP) that parses those
"friendlier" URLs for the values required by your servlet.

There's no real reason to require parameters to be passed in the
querystring format, it's just convenient because you can use
request.getParameter("parameter_name") to get required values. The
alternative is to create a meaningful URL format that you can parse.

So using your URL example:

/servlet/myServlet/parm1-value1.parm2-value2.html

It can be parsed thusly:

String uri = request.getRequestURI();
uri = uri.substring(0,uri.indexOf(".html"));
String params[] = uri.split(".");
for (int i=0; i<params.length;i++){
String pair[] = params.split("-");
// Do something ...
}