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.
Clare Lawrence is CEO of Discount Domains Ltd A leading UK provider of Domain name registration.
discountdomainsuk.com
clare@discountdomainsuk.com
