Tell me about dynamic pages

[Maria]

Hi, I am not sure if this was the right place to post but I hope that there is someone who knows the answer.
Does Googlebot index dynamic pages? Our site is not indexed except its home page and that is for long time.
I thought that dynamic content is not a problem for Google, but may be is.
What about other search engines?
Thank you.

[Ledfish]

Maria

We have been grappling with this same issue for about a month solid now. Google says it will index dynamic content. We are an ecommerce company and in 5 months, they have indexed about 8 pages out of 700. Not very good results.

I know it's unpleasent news, but I would says if you want google to index it, turn them into static. The only other option is to use either apaches mod rewrite(if your unix hosting) or ISAPI Rewrite type modeule(if your windows hosting) to rewrite the dynamic urls to look like static.

We host with a well known company right now on a shared windows server(our pages are asp). They are not willing to install the ISAPI Rewrite module unless we go to a dedicated server which is not something we can afford quite yet. We have searched for the last two days to find a windows hosting company that will offer the ISAPI Rewrite on a shared server. We have had no luck.

In Short:

If your site is on a unix server, it would appear that you can use mod rewrite which is integral to apache to rewrite the urls and it's really easy and I would recommedn this route.

If your using windows on a shared server, you might be out of luck and I would recommend making static copies of all the dynamic pages. It's a pain in the @#$, but really the only assured method.

Many of the other search engines won't index or even crawl dynamic content. So you either need to make it static or make it look static to get good indexing results.

You can always sticky mail me if you want more indepth advice and want to ask a few what-if type questions, we know the answer to pretty much all those.

[Iguana]

I added a dynamic 'Add URL' page 12 days ago and linked to it from about 900 pages as

page.asp?frompage=****&subjectid=12345

A quick check shows me that 7 pages have been indexed so far. I moved some other pages to a different server about a month ago and Google has picked up the new location for all the pages (page.asp?formid=)

Googleguy has posted on this and, if I remember, he says to avoid anything that would make Googlebot think you are using a session id (so don't use a parameter "id=") and have no more than 2 parameters.

Also, if your pages are very slow to return then Googlebot can give up (I attribute some previous difficulty in getting pages indexed to this)

*** Sorry Maria, I forgot to say Welcome to Webmasterworld! ***

[edited by: Iguana at 1:41 pm (utc) on Nov. 27, 2003]

[victor]

I have a couple of thousand pages on a completely dynamic site.

They are all indexed in Google.

There are no mod-rewrites involved.

We're No 2 for most important searches, and unaffected by Florida.

The usual rules of thumb say:

don't use ID=

don't have more than three parameters

don't have the parameters as meaningless strings.

Your googlage may vary.

[takagi]

Google doesn't like pages with a session-id (or a parameter that because of it's name or value looks like one) or multiple parameters. But it is not true that dynamic pages can only be indexed if you use some mod rewrite or so.

It is also possible that the problem is not the dynamic pages but something else like Javascript links, robots.txt, 'nofollow' and/or 'noindex', corrupt HTML, no known inbound links, etc.

[Maria]

Thank you all. I think that helps.