Follow to external site 1 link deep

[jdenman]

I have created a page that links to my partner's websites. I would like to index those pages, but not the page that the links are on. How would this be accomplished.

Zoom finds the page, but says it won't follow, since it's an external site. I cannot turn on external links exclusively, because once I'm on that site, I don't want the external links from there indexed.

I thought of spawning a zoom.exe process for each site, but wasn't sure how I would place all of the results together.

Ideas?

[Ray]

There are several ways to do this.

You can add that page as an additional start point with the "Follow only" option. This will prevent the page from being indexed, and it will only follow the links out to your partner's site. To allow it to index that site and not consider it as an external site, you can specify multiple base URLs.

From the help file:

You can also specify multiple base URLs in spider mode, to allow the spider to follow links which span across multiple domains and websites. You can do this by separating them with semi-colon characters “;”.

For example, to index the site “http://www.mysite.com/” so that it will follow links to the sub-domains,
“http://news.mysite.com/” and “http://lib.mysite.com/”
you would specify the following base URL: http://www.mysite.com/;http://news.m...ib.mysite.com/

Another approach is to add that page with the "Index and follow internal and external links" option. To prevent the contents of the page from being indexed, you can insert and tags around the content of the file.

See the Users Guide for more information on the above features
http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/usersguide.html

[jdenman]

I had my list correct - I pointed the start spider from here to my script that creates the list...which looks like this:

http://www.URL-Here.com/site/, INDEX ONLY, http://www.URL-HERE.com/
http://www.URL-Here2.com/site/, INDEX ONLY, http://www.URL-HERE2.com/
http://www.URL-Here3.com/site/, INDEX ONLY, http://www.URL-HERE3.com/

Now how do I do this on the dynamic index page?

And also - how to I specify to follow a specific site and only index 50 pages, while I tell another to index 100 pages?

Or, how can I programatically launch Zoom Search and specify a .txt file that has the list of URLs?

[David]

I had my list correct

I am not sure what list you are referring to. But if it iscorrect, that must be a good thing

I pointed the start spider from here to my script...

Again, I am not sure where, "here" is. But lets move on....

...my script that creates the list...

OK, this looks like something that you could save as a text file and import into Zoom as a list of start points. You will need to add an underscore for INDEX ONLY. It should be INDEX_ONLY.

I assume you know that the INDEX_ONLY option will index only a single page. If you want to index the entire site from a start point, you need the the INDEX_AND_FOLLOW option.

Now how do I do this on the dynamic index page?

Do what exactly? You can't get all the same multiple start point behaviour on a web page, so you need to be very precise about what you want.

How to I specify to follow a specific site and only index 50 pages, while I tell another to index 100 pages?

You can't. You can allow indexing of all pages on a site, or you can set a global limit on the total number of pages indexed or you can set a single limit that applies to all start points. You can't set a different page limit for every start point.

How can I programatically launch Zoom Search and specify a .txt file that has the list of URLs?

You could write a Zoom configuration file (which contains a list of start points). This is a Unicode text file.

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David

[jdenman]

You could write a Zoom configuration file (which contains a list of start points). This is a Unicode text file.

Has anyone done this successfully? I've got my .NET script creating the config file, but can't figure out how to save it as a Unicode file so Zoom can read it propertly.

Thanks in advance.