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I understand dynamic to be content that isn't written in html but is called up from a database by scripting within the page - in my case, PHP. A simple example I'm familiar with is a list of companies which appears when the page is opened in the browser without any action on the user's part. The content is called up by a PHP/MySQL query, which is obviously selective in what data is called up, and the URL of the page is simply something like mypage.php. Is this list of companies crawled by Google, and if so, how? Does the bot run the script? I apologize if this seems like a stupid question, but increasingly when one searches Google, one finds things like forum posts appearing in SERPS, which must presumably exist only in the database until the page is opened (and a scripted query actioned).
Forums are just one example. It's become a simple matter for a web designer to build a site - say for a small business that doesn't want to re-employ the designer after the initial site is built - so that the client can enter and update their own content through an online form (without any knowledge of website construction). The question of whether this content, held in a database, is indexed and contributes to the ranking of the page (subject to search terms) is a crucial one. So what do Google mean when they say they can crawl and index dynamic pages?
I'm interested in whether there is any disadvantage, in Google terms, in putting the content of a page in a database and having it called up with a scripted query in the page. I mean a query that requires no form action on the part of the user and where the page URL is something like mypage.php.
I can now see there's a difference as regards the URLs. In my instance - case 1 - the URL is a simple one, but when a form action is triggered by a user, a new and more complex URL - case 2 - is created with a new page (or version of the existing page) and which contains variables according to user input.
So I'm now assuming (hopefully correctly) that so long as the URL contains no variables, it doesn't really come under the normal definition of "dynamic" and that there is no Google ranking disadvantage in building case 1 type pages - they're really static pages even though their content comes from a database.
You answered your own question :) As long as there are no parameters, there's no way for Google to know that the page content is taken from the db, therefore dynamic.
that's not totally right, google could determine if a page is dynamicly generated by the headers sent, for example php outputs by default a header like
x-powered-by:php
But i'm not sure google checks that
The only visual clues could be developer's <!-- comments --> which the search engine would not see anyway, and the different type of URLs that might be used (unless you use mod_rewrite, and then you really cannot tell at all).
