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I deal mostly with dynamic sites. Most often, retrospective development and design changes for SO purposes are cost prohibitive.
I'm wondering how to approach this. Should I create static mirror pages and try and block the spider from the dynamic pages (no '?' in URL, so fine there)
Should I use cloaking in some form?
Any advice from dynamic war veterans, much appreciated :)
BG
Here is a good reference for this:
[engelschall.com...]
-G
My problem is that I can't get META, alt, title tags and the content re-enginnered in a cost effective manner. It would mean further development cost.
I could mirror the dynamic content with static.html pages but surely I risk duplication penalties?
If I block using robots.txt, then I lose a deep crawl and suffer 'no links to page' penalties?
IMO If you want to optimize selected pages, creating static pages is probably your best bet. You can then decide if you want to cloak them, if you do, you'll avoid having to worry about blocking the spiders from retrieving duplicates.
If you decide not to cloak, then you can use robots.txt to keep the spiders away from certain pages or directories, but lately robots.txt has been very unreliable at keeping bots away.
The only other choice if cloaking isn't for you, is to make the static pages different enough so that they are not flagged as duplicates.
(edited by: Air at 3:17 am (gmt) on July 19, 2001
Meta tags aren't that big of an issue, and neither are alt tags.
If you already have the static html pages made, then yes, cloaking would prob be the best way to go. When a spider comes to your site feed the html pages. When a person comes to the site feed the dynamic pages.
However, I think you might want to make the title tags the same for the static as well as the dynamic pages. *Someone confirm this for me....*
So at the minimum, you may as well optimize the titles.
The metas and alt tags don't help you that much -- too many spam artists have abused them -- so you really don't have to worry about them anyway.
If you don't want to cloak, then at least change the titles to something optimized.
Also, make sure your dynamic sites are in as many directories as possible. If your site is well made, you don't have to do any optimizing to your site.
-G
<posted at the same time as Air>
"IMO If you want to optimize selected pages, creating static pages is probably your best bet. You can then decide if you want to cloak them, if you do, you'll avoid having to worry about blocking the spiders from retrieving duplicates."
Yes. I'm optimising a few pages only.
So you're saying that robots.txt and the noindex meta tag won't work? That I would need to cloak to be sure?
Hmmmm....I have to feed the spider certain keyword densities, do I not? Text must be positioned correctly etc?
Clients and designers don't tend to like the changes that are made for the sake of establishing correct density. I was thinking that I'd tinker with the content on the duplicates.
Not for a directory. A directory like Yahoo, or ODP has a person that looks at your site: it has nothing to do with keyword densitys of the site. No spiders to worry about.
-G
