Dapper has created a service called Semantify that lets you automate custom markup for your websites. The semantic web was promised long ago as a way to provide content to everyone and make it universally accessible.
An example of the semantic web: if you have an automobile site and use the number 17 the search indexer will understand that ’17’ refers to wheel size, and will allow data usage and search based on this value.
Yahoo is the only search engine that presently supports semantic markup, so this is the only search indexing service that receives the custom code.
This works by showing custom code to this search engine, effectively doubling the kb size of your pages. When the Yahoo! spider crawls your webpage, it will be shown a semantically marked up version of your live content.
The process of adding the Dapp code to your website
1. A search engine robot requests a page from your site.
2. The code above identifies the request as a semantic search engine robot and sends a requset to Dapper.
3. Dapper runs the relevant Dapp on your page, and sends you back the semantically enriched page.
4. Your server gives the search engine robot the semantically enriched page.
The Semantify service only works with PHP, and all processing is done on semantify’s servers. This will create a bit of a lag, so luckily this process only needs to be executed when serving pages to search engines. Improvements and extensibility are in the works including the ability to use multiple languages and extended features.
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Better indexing is the bane of large ecommerce sites.