Basic SEO: What Search Engines Hate - Dynamic Web Pages

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Let's say you have dynamic web pages. What does this mean? Are they really energetic? Actually, no. It means that the web server pulled the page from a database program in the process of compiling it. They are created and exist only when they are requested by the browser, as opposed to a static page, which doesn't come from a database. Once the dynamic page is requested, the data is put together with an ASP, a PHP, or a CGI program (any content management system as well).

The problem is that many searchbots have trouble reading dynamic web pages. For one, there could be hundreds of similar pages with only minor changes on each, or the pages might change too frequently. The URLs can also change, leading to dead links. They also use parameters, and some search engines may not index pages with two or more parameters. Nevertheless, there are ways to find out if your site is causing trouble for search engines.

First of all, you can check to see how many parameters are in your URL. A URL has a parameter if it ends in “something=” (e.g. ObjectGroup_ID=81). Having one parameter should be OK for the major search engines; having two or more definitely increases the likelihood of there being a problem. Your best bet is to have a page that looks static (i.e. without parameters). To be sure though, check each search engine to see whether your site is indexed (see their "help" pages for more information).

Here are some brief overviews on a number of ways to fix your dynamic web page so that search engines will look at it. Look into the ones that strike your interest:

• You can modify URLs so that they don't look like they're referring to dynamic web pages by removing unnecessary characters (#, ?, *, !, and &) and reducing the number of parameters to one at the most.

• The database program may have a way to create static copies of pages.

• You could create static pages from the database by having it put out the entire site each time it's updated, creating static pages and URLs.

• See if your server has a tool for rewriting URLs, thereby converting fake (static) URLs into the real (dynamic) ones.

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