Static Versus Dynamic

huh

[drbill]

Well I have been cloaking for about 2 years and the biggest thing I have found is that some engines don't like Dynamic pages. All page i serve to the spiders are dynamic so I only really have one page:)

would like to hear if anyone else has run into problems with dynamic versus static?

[Brett_Tabke]

Depends on how you are serving them. All our cloaked pages are under .htm and .html files - all dynamic of course. The biggest problem is I occasionally put stuff in that changes the page from view to view. Things like dates or last modified times can often make the spider think the page is dynamic if the previous copy it has does not match.

[rcjordan]

You can frame the dynamic page and put your common keywords, content text and image links in the noframes section. This works with Google and a few others. I'm doing this with a large site and Yahoogle is really picking up on it. This suggestion pertains more to general SE indexing and not specifically to cloaking issues.

[drbill]

The thing I keep running into is the Spiders (well some of them) looks like they are looking at the page twice. Like they are checking too see if anything has changed in the last .3 sec which ofcourse it has.. Should I be feeling the fear tat I am? Banning Not listing etc?

[Air]

Inktomi's Slurp is one of the spiders that will hit the same page with multiple requests and from different IP's in short succession. I don't serve dynamic pages in the same way that you do. It sounds like your page will change everytime a spider requests it, probably from a list of keywords and meta tags that are randomly (?) selected from a file.

I feed different pages to different spiders but it is the same page until I change it. So multiple requests in short succession do get the same page.

IMO if you are doing the "build the page on the fly" thing, you do run more risk of having pages dropped particularly from Inktomi and Google.

[littleman]

This is something I have actually worked very hard on. It take some imagination to make a program that builds on the fly, AND consistently show the individual bots the same page for the same url AND incorporate enough differentiation between the urls so they do not look like they are coming out of a cookie cutter.

[PeteU]

One way of doing it is to save pages as they are build and for each subsequent reqest for it show the saved page. Then setup a cron job that deletes those saved pages every 6 or 12 or 24 hours.
The real question is if there really is a penalty for having pages slightly different every time they are build? There are many sites from large companies that work this way and I can't imagine having a page different/dynamic would alone be grounds for removal from the index.

[pete]

"All our cloaked pages are under .htm and .html files"

Do asp extensions get penalised? In my experience, I have had no problems with feeding spiders dynamic pages with asp extensions as long as the URL's do not have the allergic symbols (?).

[Air]

Yes that is true, the spiders will feed on ASP, but try and find top ranked pages with .asp in a moderate to competitive category.

They are virtually non-existant in sought after categories, in a non-competitive category you'll probably be fine.

It could be argued that there are simply a greater proportion of non .asp extentions out there, but after experimenting with a number of different file extensions, IMO, however slight (or great) you are giving yourself a disadvantage.

[Murrayson]

A fix for the doubt here is to avoid the .asp . Under the sites application config on IIS just set .htm files to be parsed by asp.dll ... the result,dynamic .htm .html files ... the spider cannot tell that the file was dynamic ... no "?" of course.