Index Dynamic URLs with Search Engine Optimization
- November 20, 2012
- Bradley Taylor
Optimizing dynamic websites has always been a major challenge for Search Engine Optimization professionals. The content of dynamic web pages are determined and generated whenever the user triggers any particular action on a dynamic webpage and naturally the content seems to be beyond the scope of optimization.
The most significant problems that webmasters face while dealing with a dynamic webpage can be listed as following:
- Instead of being a single link the static pages the dynamic urls are considered as a set of infinite links by the search engines.
- As dynamic URLs are mostly used for shopping carts and as the session id of those pages change continuously the search engines will be required index infinite number of copies of a single page and that is simply not possible.
- Dynamic pages can simply overload the search engine servers and may prevent the engines to generate the best results within the minimum possible time.
These are the reason that there is a limit in the number of dynamic pages indexed by the search engines. There are of course a few ways that will make the search engines indexing dynamic pages and along with using any software developed for this purpose that change the dynamic URLs to static URLs and get them indexed.
Apart from using CGI/Pearl script and reconfiguring web servers like Apache or ColdFusion for indexing dynamic URLs indexing dynamic web pages can be done successfully by creating a static page that is linked to a number of dynamic pages. This can be considered as extremely effective for optimizing pages carrying dynamic contents and for small businesses with a limited number of products this can prove to be extremely effective.
Amazon, the biggest online bookstore has made its dynamic web pages get indexed by this static page generation method and as no Amazon URL contain a query string the pages are indexed by the search engines and show up in the search engine results. This is a great way to make dynamic web pages more search engine friendly and used by a number of online shopping portals.
Though dynamic web pages are traditionally not indexed by the search engines and it is only a few months that Google has started indexing them. This can pretty well change the whole scenario as dynamic pages has started to feature in Google search engine results and Search Engine Optimization can turn to a completely new direction in the coming days.