Cold Fusion indexing?

[naja2183]

How are the SEs at indexing Cold Fusion(.cfm)? I've been poking around a bit but can't find a definitive answer, so I was hoping you guys would know! I thought that I had read/heard somewhere that it is "OK" but not "great" for the engines. Today though, someone said "Cold Fusion has the potential to cause code clutter, because it’s a type of flash-like markup language.  Treat it as opaque as Flash." Thoughts?

[pratt]

I've been working more and more with CF sites recently (I have no idea why). My conclusion has been that the search engines aren't treating them any different, they just make things harder than they need to be. I find this is particularly true when it comes to URLs. I've been fortunate enough to be included on all of these projects from their origin, so URL rewriting and complete architecture checks have been completed prior to launch.

I asked Rand about this in the SEOmoz Pro Q & A, he said:

My understanding with ColdFusion is that there's nothing in particular that makes it more friendly or unfriendly to SEO than any other webdev language. Like PHP or ASP, you can do things right or wrong - it depends on how you code, not what you use. Granted, there are a number of things that can be easier to do in other languages - using dashes rather than underscores or rewriting long URL strings to be short, static and clean - for example. However, I wouldn't be concerned about the language itself - just follow best practices in SEO.

Hope that helps.

[naja2183]

Yes, thanks for the insight!

[JackLeblond]

I've been working with coldfusion since pre-version 1.0.  As Pratt/Rand said - whether or not it's good for the bots is up to the coder.  If you do it well, your sites will index fine.

As for code bloat, not true.  All coldfusion code is executed on the server, browsers & bots never see it.

Also like other programming languages, url re-writing is handled bu the operating system, not by the program.  If you need url re-writing and are a windows platform, you need to install a small program (and cheap) on the server to do that.  http://www.seoconsultants.com/windows/isapi/