Dynamic or static pages?

Hi,

I'm about to add many similar pages to my site (the contents of a catalog).
I was planning to use php, so the urls would be something like: www.qwerty.com/catalog.php?item=XYZ

Woudl it be preferable to all the pages as html static files and upload the
whole lot instead? What approach works better with Google?

Thanks!

Fernando

I have done a number of sites with large numbers of both dynamic pages
and static pages.
I think that Google prefers the static sites, and tends to spider them
more quickly.
You can always trick the spiders into thinking it is a static site by
using a .htaccess hack or a 404 trick depending on your server.

Fernando Rodredguez wrote:

Hi,

I'm about to add many similar pages to my site (the contents of a
catalog).
I was planning to use php, so the urls would be something like:
www.qwerty.com/catalog.php?item=XYZ

Woudl it be preferable to all the pages as html static files and upload
the
whole lot instead? What approach works better with Google?

The best approach would probably be dynamic pages with rewritten URLs.

So the PHP would generate:
www.example.com/catalog.php?item=XYZ

and your .htaccess would rewrite it like this:
www.example.com/catalog/item/XYZ

Hello z,

whole lot instead? What approach works better with Google?
The best approach would probably be dynamic pages with rewritten URLs.

So the PHP would generate:
www.example.com/catalog.php?item=XYZ
and your .htaccess would rewrite it like this:
www.example.com/catalog/item/XYZ

Where can I find more info on this technique? O:-)

Thanks!

Fernando Rodríguez wrote:

Hi,

I'm about to add many similar pages to my site (the contents of a catalog).
I was planning to use php, so the urls would be something like: www.qwerty.com/catalog.php?item=XYZ

Woudl it be preferable to all the pages as html static files and upload the
whole lot instead?

Pages that are truely dynamic (results of an interactively defined
database
query) have to stay that way.

But most pages don't have to be dynamic at all.
If you have home-rolled software that generates dynamic pages
at run time, and if you control the source, it isn't much of a lift
to run all the print statements through a function, that has the
optional ability to name a file and print it out to the file system
as static html.

Then you can regenerate a whole site with a mouse click
any time you want, and you don't have to fight with mod_rewrite.

Site_Bot does that:
http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/1463.html

I'm sure there are others.

Fernando Rodredguez wrote:

Hello z,

whole lot instead? What approach works better with Google?
The best approach would probably be dynamic pages with rewritten URLs.

So the PHP would generate:
www.example.com/catalog.php?item=XYZ
and your .htaccess would rewrite it like this:
www.example.com/catalog/item/XYZ

Where can I find more info on this technique? O:-)

Thanks!

Tutorials:
http://www.google.com/search?q=mod_rewrite+tutorial

Cheat sheet located here:
http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/apac...e-cheat-sheet/

Official Docs:
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html

Fernando Rodríguez wrote:

Hello z,

whole lot instead? What approach works better with Google?
The best approach would probably be dynamic pages with rewritten URLs.

So the PHP would generate:
www.example.com/catalog.php?item=XYZ
and your .htaccess would rewrite it like this:
www.example.com/catalog/item/XYZ

Where can I find more info on this technique? O:-)

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html



--
Brian Wakem
Email: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/b.wakem/myemail.png

Fernando Rodríguez <frr (AT) fernando-rodriguez (DOT) com> wrote:

Hi,

I'm about to add many similar pages to my site (the contents of a
catalog).
I was planning to use php, so the urls would be something like:
www.qwerty.com/catalog.php?item=XYZ

Woudl it be preferable to all the pages as html static files and
upload the whole lot instead? What approach works better with Google?

It doesn't matter, since each page is dynamically in a way: a user agent
requests the page, and the webserver has to generate it in one way or
another (for example by reading the data of harddisk).

However, Google does an attempt to distinguish between pages that are
coming of disk, and pages that are generated on the fly by software other
then the webserver.

One thing they use is how the URL looks (since the webserver doesn't tell
Google how a page was generated). So if you use mod_rewrite to make your
URLs look "static" that part is covered.

I have no idea if Google also checks other headers (maybe yes), but those
all can be generated by PHP. In short, you can hide each and every fact
that a page was generated on the fly using PHP.

--
John Need help with SEO? Get started with a SEO report of your site:

--> http://johnbokma.com/websitedesign/seo-expert-help.html