static pages v dynamic pages

[Elaine]

Tweet

before I hurtle headlong into learning how to create a dynamic database for the site I need to know how this would effect my search engine positions.

I understand that the page is not created untill the visitor request it and then the results are pulled from a database - is this correct?

So going by that - how do the engines read the page - theres nowt there - and yet these type of sites do appear high up - how??? I find it baffling but the site is getting pretty large now and taking lots of time to update so I do need to work smarter.

But I'm loathe to lose my positions - been there done that and don't want to do it again.

[tomj]

well this is what I've learned so far about dynamic sites:

when a page is is called, the data is called, so when you are spidered, it gets data as if it was always there.

plus, its the dynamic URL's that can be bad for spidering so people recommend using mod re-write to make the urls spiderable.

I'm sure someone else will put a better example up

Tom.

[Elaine]

mod re-write

WHAT!!!! - mighty tempted to swear - my heads ramjam full of abbreviations as it is - so this is something else I'm gonna have to learn!!!

[Wardy]

Elaine, Mod_Rewrite isn't that bad. I only looked into it earlier this year and am glad I did, it makes things lots neater.

Basically, say you have a dynamic site and the url looks like this:
yoursite.co.uk/toys.php?product=157 mod_rewrite will change it to look like this
yoursite.co.uk/toys/157

There are a few posts about it on here if you do a search.

Cheers
Wardy

[watcher]

Elaine,

You'll have to take a leap of faith as far as search engine positions are concerned - if you make your site dynamic you're going to have to change the URLs of your current pages (even if you use mod-rewrite - you have to pass the query parameters somehow) so for a while they will not be indexed in Google.

The good news is that I have been getting my dynamic pages picked up by Google quickly - and even though they are PR 0 still do OK in the SERPs.

It is worth the risk.

[matbennett]

If mod rewrite looks scary (it is!), you can do search engine friendly URLs without it. The main thing is to think spiders whilst creating your link structure.