SEO on dynamic webpages?

Most of the websolutions I create are based on ASP and an Access database. I
think it's a bit weird though that none of the discussions in this group is
about SEO on dynamic pages. I mean, it's more than common today that sites
are based on ASP/PHP/whatever and a database. Does anyone know about sites
with articles covering that subject?

When I create the webpages I try to have as few pages as possible - for
instance 2 pages for a whole site, and then let the 2 pages get all
information from the database. This is a great way to work if you have a
menu with more than 100 submenus. But is this a disadvantage? Is it better
to have an individual page for each topic?

I also let the page dynamically get the title tags for the page. This is to
ensure that each page can have its individual title tag, although it's the
exact same page that get's all the content from the database. Is this in any
way a bad thing to do?

Belial wrote:

Most of the websolutions I create are based on ASP and an Access
database. I think it's a bit weird though that none of the discussions
in this group is about SEO on dynamic pages.

Have you been sleeping for the past months? Or you mean just today?

<http://groups-beta.google.com/groups...ternet.search-
engines%20dynamic%20pages>

I mean, it's more than
common today that sites are based on ASP/PHP/whatever and a database.
Does anyone know about sites with articles covering that subject?

http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2004/04/1...forgoogle.html

When I create the webpages I try to have as few pages as possible -
for instance 2 pages for a whole site, and then let the 2 pages get
all information from the database.

You mean: you use 2 static pages that generate all the dynamic pages

This is a great way to work if you
have a menu with more than 100 submenus.

I consider a menu with more than 100 submenus a bad UI design.

But is this a disadvantage?

Depends on how you create your URLs. If they are of the form:

index.asp?id=13891283923&foo=12839128391&bar=12839 12391283

you're at a disadvantage. Nobody is able to remember URLs like that.
And yes, some people remember URLs. Also, Google seems to recognise the
above URL as "dynamic" meaning it spiders more slowly (see my earlier
posts in the archive).

Is it better to have an individual page for each topic?

A search engine can not see if a page is on your filesystem or created
when it asks for it. Google (for example) guesses this by looking on how
the URL looks. If it looks dynamic, it spiders those pages more slowly
(according to their own information, sadly they don't tell you exactly
when an URL is considered dynamically, which is weird since the reason
they spider more slow is to prevent sites from crashing)

I also let the page dynamically get the title tags for the page. This
is to ensure that each page can have its individual title tag,
although it's the exact same page that get's all the content from the
database. Is this in any way a bad thing to do?

As always: how does the user experience this? As a normal site with
normal URLs? No problem.

--
John -> http://johnbokma.com/ Firefox: http://johnbokma.com/firefox/
Perl SEO tools: http://johnbokma.com/perl/
Experienced (web) developer: http://castleamber.com/
Get SEO help: http://johnbokma.com/websitedesign/seo-expert-help.html

Have you been sleeping for the past months? Or you mean just today?

I guess I have :-)

Would you happen to know of any sites that covers rewriting URLs in ASP with
code examples?

A search engine can not see if a page is on your filesystem or created
when it asks for it. Google (for example) guesses this by looking on how
the URL looks. If it looks dynamic, it spiders those pages more slowly
(according to their own information, sadly they don't tell you exactly
when an URL is considered dynamically, which is weird since the reason
they spider more slow is to prevent sites from crashing)

So if my database contains the word "foobar" Google would be able to figure
out the link to show that page? The link could for instance be
index.asp?id=3&subid=2&la=gb.

John Bokma wrote:

[snip]

Depends on how you create your URLs. If they are of the form:

index.asp?id=13891283923&foo=12839128391&bar=12839 12391283

you're at a disadvantage. Nobody is able to remember URLs like that.
And yes, some people remember URLs. Also, Google seems to recognise
the above URL as "dynamic" meaning it spiders more slowly (see my
earlier posts in the archive).

Even if people don't remember URLs when they start typing the domain
name in their browser's address bar they'll come up in a list and they
can select the page they want. When they're all in the form John
suggested it means you can't easily select one as you don't know what
that page is about. If you do use mod_rewrite (which I have started
doing myself recently) or other database trickery you can end up with
some nice URLs.

An example of this is at http://recipes.electrictoolbox.com/ where
there's only one script that drives all the pages and they're all
retrived from the database.

Example urls:

http://recipes.electrictoolbox.com/d...ngs/index.html
http://recipes.electrictoolbox.com/d...ings/dhal.html
http://recipes.electrictoolbox.com/d...gs/hummus.html

The rewrite rules I use for this are
RewriteRule ^/(.*)/(.*\.html) /index.php?category=$1&recipe=$2
RewriteRule ^/(.*)/$ /index.php?category=$1&recipe=index.html

There are other ways you can write the urls and rewrite them; for
example I don't really need the .html at the end. This site is mainly
just an experiment with search engines.

[snip]

--
Chris Hope - The Electric Toolbox - http://www.electrictoolbox.com/

Belial wrote:

Most of the websolutions I create are based on ASP and an Access database. I
think it's a bit weird though that none of the discussions in this group is
about SEO on dynamic pages. I mean, it's more than common today that sites
are based on ASP/PHP/whatever and a database. Does anyone know about sites
with articles covering that subject?

When I create the webpages I try to have as few pages as possible - for
instance 2 pages for a whole site, and then let the 2 pages get all
information from the database. This is a great way to work if you have a
menu with more than 100 submenus. But is this a disadvantage? Is it better
to have an individual page for each topic?

I also let the page dynamically get the title tags for the page. This is to
ensure that each page can have its individual title tag, although it's the
exact same page that get's all the content from the database. Is this in any
way a bad thing to do?

It's the *best* way of doing it.

http://tinyurl.com/3rykn


--
Tony

Chris Hope wrote:

John Bokma wrote:

[snip]

Depends on how you create your URLs. If they are of the form:

index.asp?id=13891283923&foo=12839128391&bar=12839 12391283

you're at a disadvantage. Nobody is able to remember URLs like that.
And yes, some people remember URLs. Also, Google seems to recognise
the above URL as "dynamic" meaning it spiders more slowly (see my
earlier posts in the archive).

Even if people don't remember URLs when they start typing the domain
name in their browser's address bar they'll come up in a list and they
can select the page they want. When they're all in the form John
suggested it means you can't easily select one as you don't know what
that page is about. If you do use mod_rewrite (which I have started
doing myself recently) or other database trickery you can end up with
some nice URLs.

An example of this is at http://recipes.electrictoolbox.com/ where
there's only one script that drives all the pages and they're all
retrived from the database.

Example urls:

http://recipes.electrictoolbox.com/d...ngs/index.html
http://recipes.electrictoolbox.com/d...ings/dhal.html
http://recipes.electrictoolbox.com/d...gs/hummus.html

The rewrite rules I use for this are
RewriteRule ^/(.*)/(.*\.html) /index.php?category=$1&recipe=$2
RewriteRule ^/(.*)/$ /index.php?category=$1&recipe=index.html

There are other ways you can write the urls and rewrite them; for
example I don't really need the .html at the end. This site is mainly
just an experiment with search engines.

[snip]

I almost forgot... those are apache rewrite rules. I know there are
plug-ins for IIS and I think their syntax is fairly similar.

--
Chris Hope - The Electric Toolbox - http://www.electrictoolbox.com/

Belial wrote:

Have you been sleeping for the past months? Or you mean just today?

I guess I have :-)

Would you happen to know of any sites that covers rewriting URLs in
ASP with code examples?

Rewriting of URLs is done by the webserver. If you use IIS, I remember
there are commercial solutions for it.

A search engine can not see if a page is on your filesystem or
created when it asks for it. Google (for example) guesses this by
looking on how the URL looks. If it looks dynamic, it spiders those
pages more slowly (according to their own information, sadly they
don't tell you exactly when an URL is considered dynamically, which
is weird since the reason they spider more slow is to prevent sites
from crashing)

So if my database contains the word "foobar" Google would be able to
figure out the link to show that page? The link could for instance be
index.asp?id=3&subid=2&la=gb.

If you link from a page to that one, yes. But if foobar is important to
you I would recommend to make your URL look like:

index.asp/foobar/

or even

index.asp/3/2/gb/foobar

and use PATH_INFO to obtain the /3/2/gb/foobar part, split it on the /
and use the parts as id, subid and la. (and throw away the foobar for
example).

If id = 3 and subid=2 means something (I guess it does, lets say 3 = aaa
and 2 = bbb), better would be:


index.asp/aaa/bbb/foobar

Maybe you need a table that translates the strings to numbers, but
that's not that hard to do.

(even better would be:

/aaa/bbb/foobar

but that does require url rewriting, and probably a look up table to
obtain that foobar => id=3, subid=2, la=gb
)

--
John -> http://johnbokma.com/ Firefox: http://johnbokma.com/firefox/
Perl SEO tools: http://johnbokma.com/perl/
Experienced (web) developer: http://castleamber.com/
Get SEO help: http://johnbokma.com/websitedesign/seo-expert-help.html

John Bokma wrote:

[snip]

Would you happen to know of any sites that covers rewriting URLs in
ASP with code examples?

Rewriting of URLs is done by the webserver. If you use IIS, I remember
there are commercial solutions for it.

I've used this one before http://www.isapirewrite.com/ It's US$49.95 and
worked very well from my experience.

Does the Windows 2003 webserver have url rewriting built into it, or do
you still have to buy third part addons? I think we used it with 2000.

[snip]

--
Chris Hope - The Electric Toolbox - http://www.electrictoolbox.com/

On Sun, 16 Jan 2005 19:49:44 +0100, "Belial" <666_NOSPAM (AT) esenet (DOT) dk>
wrote:

Most of the websolutions I create are based on ASP and an Access database. I
think it's a bit weird though that none of the discussions in this group is
about SEO on dynamic pages. I mean, it's more than common today that sites
are based on ASP/PHP/whatever and a database. Does anyone know about sites
with articles covering that subject?

The ones I know of all say pretty much the same thing, namely to give
the engines some static pages to work with and givce static urls for
the dynamic pages from them. Which means mod rewrite etc.
blash-de-blah.

When I create the webpages I try to have as few pages as possible - for
instance 2 pages for a whole site, and then let the 2 pages get all
information from the database. This is a great way to work if you have a
menu with more than 100 submenus. But is this a disadvantage? Is it better
to have an individual page for each topic?

Yup. What you want to have in the central template page is a big wodge
of nothing except presentation. From the database you need to draw the
words for the title, description and keyword tags, header tag,
paragraph contents etc and by the time you've done all that you may as
well have done the site in static html.

I also let the page dynamically get the title tags for the page. This is to
ensure that each page can have its individual title tag, although it's the
exact same page that get's all the content from the database. Is this in any
way a bad thing to do?

No it's a step in the right direction but the whole page needs to be
individual.

BB
--
www.kruse.co.uk SEO (AT) kruse (DOT) demon.co.uk
home of SEO that's shiny!
--

Big Bill wrote:

[snip]

When I create the webpages I try to have as few pages as possible -
for instance 2 pages for a whole site, and then let the 2 pages get
all information from the database. This is a great way to work if you
have a menu with more than 100 submenus. But is this a disadvantage?
Is it better to have an individual page for each topic?

Yup. What you want to have in the central template page is a big wodge
of nothing except presentation. From the database you need to draw the
words for the title, description and keyword tags, header tag,
paragraph contents etc and by the time you've done all that you may as
well have done the site in static html.

That's what I was thinking when I put that recipes site together and
started merrily putting it together as static html pages. But it was
taking soooo long. So I quickly put together some code, a database and
a form to load the recipes and I cut down the time to create the site
by a huge amount of time (it would take seconds to load each recipe
rather than about a minute using an html editor).

Whether or not to database the site really depends what the site's like,
how much stuff there is and whether or not it's all in a similar
format. There are other factors which can influence making a site
database driven but I won't go into them here.

[snip]

--
Chris Hope - The Electric Toolbox - http://www.electrictoolbox.com/