Dynamic Page questions

Why aren't my pages being indexed?

[TheDingy]

Our site uses php technology and all of our pages are devloped from hxxp://oursite/index.php?pgid=content&refid=affilate where pgid is the dynamic page we want to display and refid and other things are for once you get logged into the site. It seems that the search engines don't like this too much but we have invested a LARGE amount of money in this code and to make the entire site dynamic out of the db etc. What can we do to fix this? Maybe this is correct and we are just not waiting long enough for the SE's

Thanks,

TD

[jdMorgan]

TD,

Welcome to WebmasterWorld!

A similar issue is discussed in this thread [webmasterworld.com] and many others [google.com]. It is true that using dynamic URLs, especially those with multiple parameters, can affect your search engine ranking. Search engines are leery of indexing anything that looks like a session ID because session IDs can results in a practically-infinite number of URLs for the same page. They also don't like sites with multiple parameters, because as the number of parameters grows, the number of possible URLs increases, again approaching infinite. They want to avoid getting into a site and becoming stuck following an ever-changing set of links, and so may artificially limit the depth to which they will spider a dynamic site.

So, the solution is to avoid presenting session IDs to spiders, and to present static-looking URLs on your pages, as mentioned in that first thread. If your site and database are well-organized, and few preg_replace directives in your php code and a simple rewrite will fix this problem.

Jim