Can google crawl database?

[elvisparsley]

My ecommerce site will CMS ecommerce. And I believe most of ecommerce site use some kind of CMS. This means all the contents are in database.

How google bot and other crawlers can go into database?
What is the best practice for those who use CMS ?

Your input will be appreciated.
Thanks.

[BasicECommerce]

Are you referring to Customer Management Software (CMS)? Google does not crawl this. It is part of your back office and not searchable by anyone unless they have access (or hack) into your database.

[JPnyc]

bots can only access what the public can access.

[elvisparsley]

I meant content management system.
My question is that all the ecommerce software is database. So how we can make it SEO friendly.

JPnyc said "bots can only access what the public can access."

So it means bots can go through all the database of products, doesn't it.

[BasicECommerce]

Not quite. Search Engines only crawl what is public/posted on the website. They do not dig deep into database information.

SEO is handled on your web design by having good Page Titles, Meta Data, Content, and one-way links.

[marc77]

If you run a public knowledgebase where articles can be reached by using static URLs (not by initiating a search query only), I would recommend to generate a HTML page that contains a list of all URLs in the form of:

<Headline>: <URL to the knowledgebase article>
...

From your website, link to this HTML page.

Anyway, the algorithm behind search engines are very intelligent these days and it is hard (not to say impossible) to fool them. So what I describe above is a bit tricky, not really a black hat method, but also no good style.

You may give it a try nevertheless and report in a few days/weeks if you where able to find your knowledgebase articles in Google.

[JPnyc]

Do you mean a site map? Because a site map can have a very positive effect on search engine rankings.

[marc77]

Well, sitemap not really. I understood the poster's question that there is a database with information that should get indexed by search engines.

If there is no other way to access this database than performing search operations, it will not be scanned by robots (or have I missed latest developments ?). So as a workaround I would simply create an own list like

Read an interesting article at: http://www.me.tld/CRM/search.cgi?query=interesting+article

(of course written as a link using appropriate HTML)

Don't you think that this would be sufficient to make a robot spider this kind of information ? It was just a guess from my side without having tried that in reality before... :-)

Edit: Unlinked my sample URL; it was intended just being an example.

[veikoh]

If the database is a XML file using appropriate tags, google would love to index it

[JPnyc]

Well, sitemap not really. I understood the poster's question that there is a database with information that should get indexed by search engines.

If there is no other way to access this database than performing search operations, it will not be scanned by robots (or have I missed latest developments ?). So as a workaround I would simply create an own list like

Read an interesting article at: http://www.me.tld/CRM/search.cgi?que...esting+article

(of course written as a link using appropriate HTML)

Don't you think that this would be sufficient to make a robot spider this kind of information ? It was just a guess from my side without having tried that in reality before... :-)

that link doesn't work for me.

[marc77]

If the database is a XML file using appropriate tags, google would love to index it

Just for interest, can you provide us with the link to the required XML structure ?

Anyway, guess few to no databases are available natively in this format.

[marc77]

@JPnyc:
You mean

http://www.me.tld/CRM/search.cgi?query=interesting+article ?

This link should not work, it's just an example ;-)
(The forum software automatically converted it into a clickable link, sorry).

[veikoh]

You can try using RSS feed structure for example, check out it from my mobile blog for example at http://www.mobiblogi.com/articles.xml
and my every post is actually xml file, for example http://veikoh.freehostia.com/mblog/a...ll-in-beta.xml
w3school have tutorial of XML - http://www.w3schools.com/xml/default.asp
Google is indexing XML format much better than HTML because it's search engine native language.

[seomaterial]

Crawler or bots cannot access your database. Because database are password protected. In fact database driven site are execute on server side and send html data to client side. When a crawler or normal visitor visit database driven site, it execute on server side & result send to client side.

[marc77]

I think that the original poster of this question does not password protect the database ;-)