SEO Step By Step Guide– 55. Dealing with Dynamic Pages

In the past posts, all the optimization strategies that we discussed were basically for static pages. However, not all websites or not all the pages of a website are static. Most websites today have a combination of static plus dynamic pages. We need to have both static pages as well as the dynamic pages optimized for the search engines. This is where many webmasters struggles.

Let us try to take a quick look at how dynamic pages are created. The first point that we need to know is that dynamic pages are not like your static pages that are stored in your server and accessed as the address is accessed. Dynamic pages are just temporary pages that are generated on the fly as it were. So they do not reside in your server. The URLs or the web addresses of these dynamic pages are created on the fly. These pages will be based on a template that is stored in the server. One of the best examples of dynamic pages are the products pages in an ecommerce site. When you search for a product in an ecommerce site, the search query will collect data from the database and will assemble all the details in a preset template page so that it will look like yet another regular page in the website. Only the template is the permanent page but all the details that get filled in will be in the database.

All these factors make optimization of the dynamic pages very difficult. Search engine bots cannot possible index these pages. The session id of these pages change every time a fresh query is passed. Google is capable of indexing dynamic pages but only in a limited way. When Google tries to index dynamic pages, it limits the total number of dynamic pages it will include in the index. Because indexing of all the dynamic pages will over load the Google servers.

Some websites use CGI/PERL to generate search engine friendly URLs for the dynamic pages which replace “?” with a “/” symbol. Yet another possibility of dealing with this issue is to check with your hosting service provider and ask them to reconfigure your server to apache server.

If your website is a relatively smaller website, you can take another long shot, which would be to create static pages for all your dynamic pages and load it in a server. But if you happen to have a database enabled site with thousands of pages, then such an approach will not be the best approach. However, when you do this then you can optimize the replica static pages like your regular pages. It is best to consult an experienced SEO company to assist you with their professional help. SEO for complex dynamic sites have to be done on case by case basis so your SEO company will be able to provide you with a tailor made solution.

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