Simple Search Engine Optimization of dynamic sites

Dynamic sites require Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is a seemingly complex weavework of little facts built out of how people believe things work. Partly this is because the search engines do not make their algorithms known - that is part of their competitive edge. Search engine businesses spend a lot of time and energy researching how to best index the internet, so that people using their engine find what they are looking for AND they make money on paid search and connection services.

Because the covert algorithms of search engines evolve rapidly, many myths - "known facts" about how people believe SEO works - exist and perpetuate long past their 'sell-by date'. Here is a particularly sticky myth:

Search engines cannot index sites with long query string url's with magics like '?' and '=' in them.

Search engines send out their spiders to crawl the Web and bring back as many urls and pages as they can. Go out and feed! The spiders go from link to link gobbling up everything they can find. This simple ecosystem works well for what is now known as "static urls". Static urls link to what is already a web (html) page on your site and server.

Complexity starts when spiders get to particular dynamic pages found on dynamically generated sites. Dynamically generated pages don't actually exist on the server until someone clicks a link. When a dynamic link is clicked, data stored on the server is pulled from a database and converted into a web page. For visitor experiences this doesn't matter, as long as we can ignore those complex unreadable urls appearing up top in our browser.

But the bots have a problem. These types of long query string urls lead to many different urls which in turn lead to pages that are very similar (and often the same) as other ones on the site. If a search engine spider were to eat all the different variations that each such a page on a site might have, it could end up just sitting there and eating, and eating, and eating ... millions of similar pages. And when one of these page sets has some hard to detect "loops" leading to each other, the number of urls for it to gobble up are infinite.

That's why Search engines cannot index sites with long query string url's with magics like '?' and '=' in them.

Myth Busted!

While it is true that for years search engines programmed their spiders to stay away from urls that might be dynamic (based on whether the url contained magics like '?' and '='), nowadays Google, for example, is fully capable of indexing dynamic urls and ranking them normally.

True, they still seem to handle static urls more efficiently, deeply and frequently. We can still report significant difference, for instance, between crawling a dynamic link on a dynamic url and a dynamic link on a static url. And that's understandable, for crawling urls with query strings like '?' and '='does require some extra intelligence by a search engine spider, if only to make sure it isn't lost or eating itself rounder and rounder in circles though a never ending pie.

An evolution. The web spiders have become way more intelligent than they were before. We can also report that rewriting urls and url aliases has greatly improved our own indexing of dynamic sites, and that quality of content is still the major factor for Google ranking. Simple and true.

And like the more intelligent search engine spiders, we simply do not get lost in all of the details of doing "perfect SEO" and "outplotting" the search engines to prove our intelligence, for that doesn't return value for you, our customer. We focus on the business purpose of a site or portal at hand and on what works for you and what doesn't.

About the Author

This article was written by Wyrd Web