Solutions for Dynamic Website Ranking
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It's a common problem for any developer of a database driven website: how do you achieve a good ranking in the search engines when most of their spiders can't handle dynamic URLs? Burhan Khan discusses a number of techniques to help you show up on the spiders' radar and "get rank" as high as any static website.
In this article, we will explain how database driven websites cause indexing problems for search engines and some useful ways to optimize and achieve ranking in major search engines.
Why are dynamic websites difficult for search engines to index?
On today's Internet, database driven or dynamic websites are very popular and necessary to pass information between the database and the user in the easiest way. Database driven websites often need certain information before they can return page contents: session id, cookie data, or query string. Only one page written in server side scripting (ASP) can handle thousands or millions of records separately.
URLs containing Query string use a question mark (?). The problem is web crawlers cannot read and are not trained to understand a dynamic website’s URLs containing question marks (?) , equal signs (=) or other marks such as: # , & , ! and so forth. These signs are referred to as “spider traps.” Any of these signs in the URL spell bad news for dynamic websites. Most of the search engine spiders check the URL for these signs, and then ignore it.
Here is an example of a dynamic website's URL:
www.mysite.com/pages.asp?id=120&sname=welcome%3ADear&category=books
Additionally, dynamic websites contain dozens of function in a single page, and all optimized HTML code lie in these functions. Search engines do not like to execute these functions because the repeated requests for pages can crash the server. So what is the benefit of optimized code if the search engine will not see it? And surely no one can find that site.
Next: What is going wrong? >>
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