dynamic web pages! (Full Version)

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daywalker -> dynamic web pages! (6/3/2007 4:36:14)

I have old web pages doing well on the Search Engines but am changing over to a Content Management System CMS site with dynamic web pages (often .asp, .php, .jsp etc)
Will a search engine index dynamic web pages as well or are there problems with dynamic web pages? needs suggestions!



Reflect -> RE: dynamic web pages! (6/4/2007 7:53:26)

Welcome to Outfront!!!

I would do a 301 on the old pages with a redirect to the new.

Now on dynamic pages, please give an example of a URL. Most will get spidered depending on how the session is handled.

Also it's cool that you want to show everyone your stats. I would hide that or make it secure though.

From looking at your stats if that is an example of a dynamic URL it will work but if you can convert it that would make it much better.

Take care,

Brian



daywalker -> RE: dynamic web pages! (6/16/2007 8:39:10)

thanks moderator
thanks for your reply! I am not sure about the example!



Reflect -> RE: dynamic web pages! (6/18/2007 8:28:04)

Hi,

The example I rambled about was found by going to your index page and clicking on the site meter link (being your stats that are open to the world to see).

From there I saw listed:

http://infocrystals.com/?a=articles&p=26

An SE can read that dynamic session. However by making the output static you can lace keywords into the URL while it is still dynamic. I would see if the script or system that you use has any FAQs on doing this.

Take care,

Brian



rdouglass -> RE: dynamic web pages! (6/18/2007 9:03:24)

Another option is maybe you have ISAPIRewrite or something like that on your host? I have used that quite effectively before. I frequently use a rule that rewrites a URL from something like this:

www.mydomain.com/myPage.asp?page=1&topic=2

into this:

www.mydomain.com/myPage.asp/page/1/topic/2

It seems to work pretty well in the sense that many search engines will stop parsing the URL at the '?' and with this, there is no '?'.



ThomasMobley -> RE: dynamic web pages! (9/8/2007 16:03:18)

I'm very curious about this as well. I work for a web developer in Walterboro, and she insists that one page be created with menus, banners, headers, footers, etc, and then for each page in the site you copy that first page and make any changes needed in content. The sole exception is applications, which I do, but even there I'm not allowed to include things like banners, footers, etc....

Now I'm starting to do a lot of the actual static pages for her, and the whole copy the template, rename it, change the content thing bugs me a tad. Some of the pages are just huge, and it would make more sense to me to clean it up a bit with some includes.

My personal web site has a div in the banner where quotes are fed in through an asp include file that randomly selects one. I wouldn't expect that to be much good to spiders anyway, but my menus are dynamically generated by an asp file and written into the navigation div. I do that because these are articles or pictures and I can just add a directory or file and these are automatically included in the menu with no interaction on my part...are the spiders able to see those links?

Also, the content is selected depending on a passed parameter and loaded via an asp function as well. Of the entire page the only thing that is actually typed in and static is the header banner and head section, which I would also like to be dynamically generated based on the page being loaded. There are only two actual pages, one for articles and one for pictures, and the content is just read and placed into the content area.

I don't really care that much about my own site being spidered or ranked, but it would sure be nice if we could use includes for the things that are repeated throughout our customers web sites....not to mention having to change every instance of something on every page if it has to be changed.

Is she correct that you will never get a SE ranking and the spiders ignore you if you're pages are loaded via asp and includes?



Tailslide -> RE: dynamic web pages! (9/8/2007 16:52:05)

I think she's wrong - includes are included at the server before the browser actually reads the pages - so as long as the links themselves are "real" and not javascript links, the act of using an include won't make any difference at all - apart from make your life an awful lot easier!

I don't think there's many "pros" that don't use includes of one type or another.



ThomasMobley -> RE: dynamic web pages! (9/8/2007 17:37:13)

Thanks for the response Tailslide. I'm actually a recent convert to web programming after 20 years writing desktop db apps and hardware interfaces, so this is a bit foreign to me, but not using includes made no sense to me. The functions for dynamics may make sense, but I don't know. She does get good money and has a loyal clientel with high page rankings, and she pays well too, so I after I realized she wasn't going to change her mind on the necessity of this for ranking I just shut up and started doing it like she says, but it just bugs me.

Another odd thing is that she names all of her pages .asp, even if they aren't, and she didn't know how to create vbscript functions...her applications did work but they were sure hard on the eyes I can tell you...strings everywhere. She does beautiful graphics and css though. You should have seen her when I started punching out php code and using ajax. Since I do all of my development on my own server I wasn't about to buy aspmail and aspupload when I could do those things for free. Took a bit of doing to get her to let me do it.

So on the same subject, can I use an include for my metatags and just load vars for things like keywords, title, description, etc..? My web site only has the two pages with dynamically loaded content, so it would be nice if I could change things like that on the fly.

The real thing is if I include a .inc file with content loaded via variables, does it get included before the spider gets to it or does the spider follow the include, in which case the vars wouldn't have loaded yet. If I load my menu via an asp function, does the spider even see anything other than a function call that gets ignored, or does the asp engine actually build the page first, then the spider sees the results?

This whole SE thing is a bit mysterious to me, and I can't seem to find a formal means of determining what's valid for SEO and what isn't. A lot of keyword this and content that, but I don't seem to find information that says "don't include/function/php/asp/whatever" content that you want a SE to see for rankings.



Tailslide -> RE: dynamic web pages! (9/9/2007 3:54:59)

I use PHP includes and occasionally SSIs rather than asp etc - but I have to assume that it's the same idea for those too. As soon as something asks for the page (be it a search engine, browser, spam bot, whatever) the server assembles the page from it's component parts, markup, images, includes etc and outputs it to whatever requests it.

The requester never ever sees the raw server-side code (unless you've got an error in there) - this is a quote from the W3schools site about PHP includes:
quote:

You can insert the content of a file into a PHP file before the server executes it, with the include() or require() function.


And Digital Web Magazines says about includes:
quote:

One of the fundamental ways to create easily maintainable sites is to cut down as much as possible the coding required for repeated content.


Personally, I name all of my pages .html even when they have PHP in them, and add a rule into the .htaccess file to deal with this.

I see no reason why the whole page can't be assembled from various includes - including the content (if you see what I mean) rather than just having the menu or footer in an include around the static content.

As far as search engines go - there are people on here who specialise in them and have a much deeper knowledge than me so I can only speak from personal experience.

I find that I get reasonable success from using nice, semantic markup - for instance - search engines seem to give a lot of importance to H1 heading tags (but you should only use it once on a page otherwise it dilutes the effect).

I also use CSS for the layout and styling which means that in the page itself you only get the basic markup and the content - far as I know, search engines only read a certain amount of the page so not having a ton of unnecessary markup in there hopefully helps (I know there are people who say it doesn't matter at all - this is just my view).

The most important thing in my view is good relevant content with well thought out key phrases sprinkled in (also in the heading tag).

Things to avoid I think would be any form of keyword stuffing (in alt attributes, headings, text coloured the same as the background etc). The Keyword metas don't matter much any more as far as I know. Also avoid Javascript links - however they're created, links should be "real".

Search engines don't seem to like very long parameters in URLs either - so if you've got lots of dynamically created pages you'd want to try to keep the parameters down to the bare minimum - maybe just id and a number? This is from the Google blog:

quote:

"[Google now indexes] URLs that contain that parameter. So if your site uses a dynamic structure that generates it, don't worry about rewriting it -- we'll accept it just fine as is.

Keep in mind, however, that dynamic URLs with a large number of parameters may be problematic for search engine crawlers in general, so rewriting dynamic URLs into user-friendly versions is always a good practice when that option is available to you.

If you can, keeping the number of URL parameters to one or two may make it more likely that search engines will crawl your dynamic urls."


If you want to see how Google might view your page then you could try using this utility: http://www.ibusinesspromoter.com/download/index.htm

I think that if you've got a developer who's area of expertise is CSS and front-end design then you should play that up to her and hopefully get her to release her grip on the backend stuff and pass that responsibility over to you. Maybe try the angle about how great it is to have someone who understands the complexities of web standards (assuming she does!) in websites these days - and how important it is these days to have really good front-end CSS layouts for speed and accessibility and ease of maintenance.

There are very few people around who seem to have an equal grip on both front-end and back-end design (personally I'm about 80/20 weighted towards front-end design) and it's easy to end up not really being expert at either. She obviously hired you for a reason - you just need to remind her of it!



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