Search Engine Optimization for Dynamic Pages

As we have discussed elsewhere in this site - getting the maximum visibility from the search engines requires that the search engines find your pages in the first place. They need to index all your content. They have to follow the links in a logical thematic order to gain rankings in the search results pages.

There are many ways of achieving the end results. As a first step, make sure that they can crawl all your pages of content. This is relatively easy if they are of the static type - Plain vanilla HTML pages. If you use database driven dynamic pages in your site, things can become a little complicated for the crawlers. Use our Spidering tool from Webmaster Tools section to see if the robots can really "see" all the pages.

Getting top position for dynamic contents can be difficult if the Search Engine robots (variously called as Crawlers or spiders) can't follow the query strings in the dynamic pages' URL.
eg: www.some_site.com/display.asp?product=987654&id=234618&cat=2ert56&mfg=apricot

Many robots choke on the strings after the '?' in the above URL and as a consequence will ignore the dynamic pages. Googlebot is better at digesting the dynamic contents than some others, but it would be prudent to limit the number of characters in the URL.

It is difficult to generalize the exact process of making the dynamic links appear as static pages in the eyes of the robots. Solutions to optimize the dynamic contents will vary depending upon issues like the language (Perl,PHP,ASP,JSP etc), the server platform (Unix,Linux or any other *nix /Windows) or the server ( Apache or IIS).

There are many commercial software which seek to 'paraphrase' the dynamic pages into making them appear as static pages. Some methods involve techniques to use custom error message scripts to trap the path information and present them as valid inputs for the scripts to serve the dynamic pages from a look-up table.

We have our own Search Engine which mimics the action of some of the leading Search robots - to explore your website. This robot which faithfully obeys the standard robots.txt to crawl the websites leave 'Prowler 5.x ' as the User Agent in your server log files. This unique proprietary technology affords us the added advantage of seeing exactly the pages crawled by other Search Engines. It saves us considerable time and effort in optimizing your dynamic pages.