What's an easy way to create 3,000 similar web pages quickly?

[sherikatz]

Here is the situation...
I need to create a large web site with about 3,000 pages. The pages are almost identical. There are certain fields that need to be changed for every page (The title tag for each page, some text which is in the same location in every page etc…).
It would be a lot of work to do it individually for every page.
What is the best way to go about this?
thanks,
sheri

[ahmed]

sounds like the perfect job for a scripting language like PHP or ASP.

You can store all the content that needs to change in a database or text file, and then insert markers into the html where you want them to appear. Your pages would then have an id number appended to the url e.g. www.example.com/index.php?id=57 .

When the page loads, the scripting engine fetches the record which corresponds to record number 57, and displays the value in the actual fields instead of the markers themselves.

That is a very very watered down version of how it works. I recommend doing a search for ASP or PHP to learn more. Also, if you have a recent version of Macromedia Dreamweaver, it has a very good (as in easy to use) feature which lets you create these 'dynamic' sites. With their tutorial, you can have a simple dynamic page which uses MS Access to retreive the content up and running in less than a day.

hth

[snookie]

pay someone, preferably me ;-)

[g1smd]

Would a site with 3000 "similar pages" attract a duplicate content penalty and fail to be fully indexed by Google?

Probably.

[sherikatz]

THANKS GUYS,\
I FORGOT TO MENTION THAT THE PURPOSE OF ALL THIS BIG SITE IS TO GENERATE TRAFFIC AND TARGET KEY WORDS. SO THE URL NEED TO INCLUDE THE KEY WORDS.
SHERI

[RonPK]

No need to scream, sheri. Or maybe your keyboard is broken.

All can be done easily with a scripting language like PHP, as mentioned earlier. What is the problem?

[SlowMove]

Everyone seems to be writing about PHP. Perl is the other language for text processing. If you decide to try Perl, you're quickest route is to get a copy of "Learning Perl." Whatever scripting language you decide to use, you will probably want to go beyond doing things like changing the titles on the pages. These language are not easy to learn, but once you understand how to use them, they will make doing the things you're asking about seem very easy. It's worth the hassle, preferably used with Unix/Linux.

[g1smd]

>> GENERATE TRAFFIC AND TARGET KEY WORDS <<

Sounds like you are generating doorway pages.
Doesn't sound very useful to visitors.
Probably looks like spam to Google.

[SlowMove]

Probably looks like spam to Google.

It is possible to create a lot of pages that both generate traffic and are useful to visitors. It's not easy to do, but possible.

[ip2665]

I saw some similar websites which have the same format for each of their webpages. They look good and have good rank in google. In my opinion it is not doorway since it has it's own content.

regards,
ip2665

[edit_g]

It is possible to create a lot of pages that both generate traffic and are useful to visitors. It's not easy to do, but possible.

I'll second that. Its called SEO. ;)

[ergophobe]

If it appears as spam to Google (oh that it were so!), then why do I so often put in a search term and get hits on pages that have nothing, zero content, related to my search term, but seem to be some site that simply has dictionary words for title and keywords and they are selling something completely unrelated (I'm not talking about paid inclusion on Google, which often seems equally irrational)?

[sherikatz]

I think this is more the case after the last google dance "Florida". I think it will go back to normal after this dance. The line between spaming and good seo technic is thin. What happend is that google redefined spaming. as a result google search result dismissed some good relevant sites that were also using good seo technics.

[bull]

Get a compiler like OpenWatcom and write a small app that generates static html files that are well interlinked. No script parameter issues with google and the possibility to get your keyword in filenames.

[figment88]

If you combine a server side scriptiung language with mod_rewrite, you can quickly create the apparence of 3000 pages.

Rewrite all of the requests to a single file that pulls from a database, writes the title tags, whatever text you need, and creates more links.

[a1call]

Hi,
>Would a site with 3000 "similar pages" attract a duplicate content penalty and fail to be fully indexed by Google?
Probably.

Yes good examples would be dmoz and yahoo directories.

;)

[victor]

Yes good examples would be dmoz and yahoo directories.

One critical difference here, I suspect. Yahoo and DMOZ's content has been attested to / verified as useful by all their incoming links.

3000 pages of unlinked (or only internally linked) babble is not going to excite a search engine.

[SlowMove]

babble is not going to excite a search engine

True. I've tried it.

3000 pages is really nothing. It can be done every day once you know how to do it. The trick is to get some real content on all the pages, and mix them up with a few top quality pages. Then you should be able to get some inbound links and search engine traffic.

[TryAgain]

It is possible to create a lot of pages that both generate traffic and are useful to visitors. It's not easy to do, but possible.

From zero to 3000 similar web pages that "are useful to visitors"?

Allow me to be HIGHLY SKEPTICAL.

I'll second that. Its called SEO.

I'll second that as well.

;)

[SlowMove]

>Allow me to be HIGHLY SKEPTICAL.

Look at a site that provides weather information for many areas. Similar pages, but again, not easy.

[g1smd]

looks like spam. sounds like spam. walks like spam. talks like spam.

[Robino]

And if you have to ask how to do it, you're probably not going to accomplish much.

[SlowMove]

I think if we're talking about useful pages, it's really a matter of starting with useful data, and knowing how to manipulate that data.

[sidyadav]

If you own/have a blog, news site or a journal, you always have approximately/upto 3 "almost duplicate" pages.
How?
Printer Friendly Version; Permanent Archive; Comments; RSS partners/people who take feeds; Text database (if indexed in Google; if your blogging program uses it.
Why
So it is useful for users
Do you get a penalty?
Absolutely not! I don't know a lot of duplicate pages and how Google gives you a penalty, but I'm sure there about more than a 1,000 blogs out there using MoveableType or a similar blogging program, but haven't seen any penalty on this.

Therefore, I don't think Google will give you a penalty for having 'almost duplicate' content; although, I'm not an expert on this. I'm sure there is at least one person reading this post dis-agreeing to my comment. If so; go ahead and correct me!

Sid

[asquithea]

I, too, am rather dubious about the utility of 3000 similar pages, but it must surely depend on the type of site and degree of similarity...

My own site has more than 10000 unqiue pages (excluding arbitrary logical page combinations) and is entirely CGI based (PHP backed by a large MySQL database). Many of the pages are similar. It's useful, though only to a those who know what it's about.

The only valid use for such a site that I can think of is data presentation. Can that be the case if the OP didn't know how to go about creating it? Hmm...

[sherikatz]

OK GUYS!

Let me explain more clearly the purpose of my 3,000 pages.
It is for different location and cities in the U.S. The content I would say is 75% the same and the rest is unique for each page. What I would like to avoid is creating each page separately. What I am looking for is a simple application that has some kind of form for the predefined fields that I would need to change (text, title, address etc…)
And yes it would be optimized for search engine because it deals with the main subject matter that don’t change and the particular information about the geographical location that changes.

[jbgilbert]

Sheri,

Here is the deal (I know this for a fact).

IS IT HARD TO DO?
It is not hard to do, BUT there are very few ready to buy programs out there to do what you need. That is why everybody is telling you to do something in a scripting language like PHP or Perl. If you have no programming skills whatsoever, you will not be able to automate the build.

WHAT WILL GOOGLE (or the other SEs) DO WITH IT?
Depends... Many sites get away with exactly what you are doing. A few get banned. The ones that eventually get banned are "probably" complained about by competitors and Google gets a manual review of the site in and decides what to do. Personally, I do not consider this spam, because it it IMPOSSIBLE to do regional targeting and get good rankings with only a few pages.

If you want more info sticky mail me.

[SlowMove]

I could be wrong, but I think you either have to try to use something like the template function in Dreamweaver, or move up to a scripting language.

[Eric_Jarvis]

Strikes me that what you need is a simple page template that includes the common information. You'll have to type or paste in the other stuff anyway so why not just slap it straight on to the template and save as the relevant filename.

If you are likely to have to change the common content too often for a global find/replace to be sufficient then include it with SSI.

You aren't saving any effort by making the procedure more complex than that.