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Dynamic pages and the Search Engines By Clare Lawrence 10th March 2003 Clare is the CEO of Discount Domains Ltd a leading UK Domain name registration service.

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: 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. discountdomainsuk.com; clare@discountdomainsuk.com

Determining the Right Hosting

Apart from money issues there are a lot of characteristics to reckon when choosing a hosting company. The first thing to be aware of is what kind of website you are planning to run on the host. If you’re projecting to run a dot net or ASP website you have to choose a Windows IIS solution and if you project to operate PHP or a Word Press blog, you must choose a UNIX supported Apache Server.

After selection of the right platform you have to be positive you receive unlimited bandwidth and transfer and frequently it is also for your advantage to be able to setup unlimited e-mail accountings. If you operate dot net or ASP you must have admission to a MSSQL server and make sure the cost for that is fair. Operating PHP or Word Press site requires a MySQL database and naturally a PHP5 installment.

Uptime is critical, 99.99 % uptime is important, no host will assure you 100 % uptime. You will also need to consider the servicing and backup from your hosting company to be able to run your web site as smooth as viable, which is also necessary for Google optimization and SEO in large.

Word Press is recommended for a inexpensive and flexible net result and hosting your website on a UNIX based host working Apache and MySQL is an approved web hosting solution which is easy to maintain without computer programing skills and knowledge and Word Press is also simple to optimise for search engines like Google and Bing.

Your World Wide Web hosting company is the base of your WWW presence and it is very critical to select the proper web host from the beginning. You can transfer server subsequently, but making special research to find a good hosting company from the set out is the most intelligent move, especially if you program to get a huge number of traffic which should be able to build without the downtime which will take place during transfer from one server to different.

One of the most weighty facets of any online business is how do I bring home the bacon in the major search engines. How do I have my site to rank well in Google?

One of the most powerful aspects of doing winning in the search engines (allowing for the basic principle suchlike outstanding content are taken care of) is bringing in links to your website. You can build this a couple of different ways, some looked at positively by the search engines and some not so positively.

One of the dependable styles, that the search engine engineers think is O.K. is link building with articles.

Essentially this necessitates composing a solid article, preferably about something from your business, and then posting it to a free article directory.

You really cannot underestimate the crucial nature of link building. If there is one point that means the most to the search engines, on the whole, it is links. Sure, there are bus loads of other signals, like the domain name, but you are kidding if you reckon you are going to be listed well, and easily found, if you do not cause any links.

Building links with articles is easy. It is something the search engines say is okay. And, it adds value to the web, by providing valuable content that might be interesting or useful to users. The real question is what are you waiting for?