Good stuff, great to hear – PHP is a great little language. Once you get familiar with it you should look into a PHP framework such as CodeIgniter.

As for Google, you’ll just need to make sure you’re not returning any 404 response codes in your header. (You can eaisly change your headers using PHP). I couldn’t get to your site to check for you (it appears to be down). Also make sure you have full links such as http://www.exmaple.com/portfolio/#portfolio in your sitemap.xml and you should also have a HTML Navigation Menu / Sitemap in the Flash alternate content in the embed DIV and again use full URL’s here.

That should get Google properly indexing your site and deeplinking to the correct pages in your Flash movie.

Let me know how you go.

Thanks to you I’ve been getting into learning php which makes content creation and xhtml coding a peice of cake. One thing I have noticed however is that the googlebot does not index the pages created within the 404 php file, but instead it marks them as 404 unavailable. So for example, of the 17 pages I submitted via the sitemap.xml only 1 has been indexed, with the others all throwing crawl errors.
This means doing a google search for something as specific as http://www.mydomain.com/portfolio does not find the submitted page http://www.mydomain.com/portfolio because it is not indexed.

Maybe we need to actually create these pages rather than simply spoof them with the 404. What do you think?

Great work, interesting find, obviously there are some small differences in the way Apache and IIS handle their header info but it’s good to know the script also works on Apache with a small mod.

Enjoy your SEO & Deeplinking.

return $deepLink;
}

function curPageURL() {
$pageURL = ‘http’;
if ($_SERVER["HTTPS"] == “on”) {$pageURL .= “s”;}
$pageURL .= “://”;
if ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] != “80″) {
$pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].”:”.$_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
} else {
$pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
}
return $pageURL;
}

$curPageURL = curPageURL( );
$requestedDeepLink = getDeepLink( $curPageURL );

$title=”Home”;
$description=”Meta Tag Description for Home”;
$keywords=”Meta Tag Keywords for Home”;
$inPageContent=”Oops 404″;
$noscript=”Some altenate content for non-javscript users on Home”;

I’ve got it working now. For some reason the line $requestedDeepLink=getDeepLink(); was not working properly. All I did in the end was to split this line into 2 steps.
$curPageURL = curPageURL( );
$requestedDeepLink = getDeepLink( $curPageURL );

The full code is:

Thank you for your swift reply!

I meant the variables in the PHP. ie $title, $description, $keywords etc. These never change from the original settings. ie $title=”Home”; I have not wired in the SWFAddress yet, as I would like to get the php working first.
The code I am using is the same as yours in step 4, with one line changed $inPageContent=”404 Oops”;

The result is tinyurl.com/mhgstj (I am hiding my domain from the spiders).

Could it be something to do with it being on Apache rather than IIS?

Thanks again,

J

Not a problem, When you say the variables are set to the defaults, do you mean the SWFAddress variables in Flash arn’t being set or those in the PHP?

You could try running an $requestedDeepLink statement anywhere after the $requestedDeepLink=getDeepLink(); call to determine if the correct variable information is being passed from the URL to the PHP.

If you’re still having problems you could try posting the code that you’re running and Ill take a look.

Thanks in advance,

J