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Do search engines such as Google penalise dynamic pages?
Dynamic pages are used to deliver content from a database to websites –
the advantage being that data can be updated and the contents of pages changed
without the need to reload pages etc.
Google publishes guidance notes on its site at
http://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html and at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
These say that dynamic pages are indexed but that the Googlebot ( Google’s
spider ) can overwhelm dynamic sites and therefore the amount of pages indexed
are limited
Google recommends:- “If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e. the URL
contains a ‘?’ character) be aware that not every search engine spider
crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters
short and the number of them small.
How to get dynamic pages indexed
There are ways to get dynamic pages indexed, if the site is relatively small,
then create a site map, which has static links to each of the dynamic pages.
This gives the search engines a “doorway” to the dynamic pages.
For larger sites there are a number of ways to change the syntax of a dynamic
URL so that it appears to be static.
e.g. http://www.discountdomainsuk.com/glossary.php?lang=english&gid=28 can
be re-written as http://www.discountdomainsuk.com/glossary/english/28
Index pages If your index page is dynamical generated then it will be particularly
difficult for search engines to index your site. If possible you should avoid
dynamically generated index pages
Algorithms
The search engines and Google in particular are getting better at indexing
dynamic pages.
Looking for more advice?
We have built up an article bank on our site – many from the leading specialists
in each field, please feel free to browse them, The articles cover Domain articles
, Web hosting articles , , Search engine articles , e-marketing and much more.
Conclusion
Dynamic pages are very useful to deliver content particularly if you wish to
use a content management system. The Search engines do have some difficulties
with dynamic content, but there are ways to improve the chances of dynamic pages
being indexed.
About the Author:
Clare Lawrence is CEO of Discount Domains Ltd – A leading UK provider of
Domain name registration and Web Hosting services. Please feel free to re-publish
this article provided this reference box remains together with a hyperlink to
http://www.discountdomainsuk.com Clare can also be contacted on clare@discountdomainsuk.com. |
