Static or Dynamic

telling the difference

[kellimsf]

Could someone please help me with such a basic question, how can you tell if a page is static or dynamic.
Is this an example of a dynamic page?
screens/s18088.htm?Num=0

[jatar_k]

A query string doesn't necessarily mean that the page is dynamic. Just as an .html extension doesn't mean it is static.

Dynamic is a very broad word and people seem to use it for anything with a little server side scripting on it (or for anything with a query string).

It is very difficult to tell from the front end if something is "dynamic" or not. If it has a query string and you guess that there is an aspect of dynamic content then you will probably be right more than wrong.

As an example, my pages are 100% dynamic database and template driven but they look and act static with .html extensions and no query strings.

so, you never can be sure.

[kellimsf]

Thank you for your reply. It has left me more confused because it seems that it is not such a simple question. You probably need more info that unfortunately I cannot disclose. But I will do more research on it. Thank you again for your help.

[seoRank]

If you have a query string with charaters like "? = & %", it is almost certainly dynamic (coming from a database)

If the extension is just .asp , .php etc. , it may be static or dynamic page.

However a static looking page ending in .htm / .asp / .php etc. can be dynamic if the server is running Mod_Rewrite (a script which makes dynamic pages look static to Search Engines)

[topr8]

something i have observed which may be of help to you is this ...

go to the page in question in a browser and view source of the page.

if the code does not start on the first line then there is a very good chance that some server side script was run before serving the page.

of course there can be other reasons for this including just that the code for the page was written starting on line 2 and line 1 was left blank. likewise if the code starts on line 1 it could still have be "dynamically" created.

but as a quick indicator i'd say there was a strong chance that it is dynamic.