What pages does Google NOT index?

Want to go dynamic .cfm?id=1 .asp etc.

[clarksc3]

I am wanting to turn my 10000 page static hmtl website into a dynamic website. Possible in cold fusion or asp. I have boticed some sites that have pages name "page.cfm?id=234" for example are not indexed in Google and show not page rank.

Please help before I covert all my pages and possible lose all my future search engine traffic.

Thank you,
Clark

[Rossv1]

Google will follow and index dynamic pages. I have numerous sites coded entirely using Cold Fusion and they are completely indexed. If you are worried about it, there are methods to create 'search engine friendly' urls from dynamically created pages.

[ILLstyle]

Up utill a few months ago google never spidered my .CGI pages for some reason but now it spiders and indexes all of them. on one of my sites I use .shtml, .php and .pl
they all seem to get spidered great and cached properly.

[clarksc3]

Some pages I have seen that have a .cfm?id=123 do not have a page rank. These pages have been around for a while and are linked to from a PR5+ page. Maybe they are index and can be found with a search engine but they just do not hold page rank?

Know of any references to the methods of "Search Engine Friendly" pages?

[Ledfish]

Although Google does index dynamic pages, I have found that this can be a blanket statement. I had a site with dynamic pages and never could get googlebot to look at them. I created a sitemap and even that didn't help. Our were asp based, so I used a windows server add on that allowed us to rewrite the urls to look static, much like apache's mod-rewrite capability.

With 10 Days, Googlebot was eating those new static looking urls up like wildfire.

My conclusion is that how willing googlebot is to read and index dynamic pages is somehow dependent on pagerank, backlinks, etc.

[hughie]

I built myself a system recently in php/mysql that instead of giving index.php?pageid=10 (or whatever)
it creates the file websitepage.php.

when the page loads i check in the database to find the ID of the database entry with File_Name=websitepage.php and draw the content just as if it had been index.php?pageid=10

The next step i took after that for content pages and similar (pages that dont do anything fancy) was to read websitepage.php and save the HTML output of php to a flat HTML file - thus giving the search engines exactly what they want.

I forgot to add that the Search engine results were a vast improvement in my PR ratings and a much deeper crawl.

I hope that makes some kind of sense, it's quite difficult to explain.

ta,
Hughie

[BigDave]

Don't use id=, use something that cannot be confused as possibly being a session ID. And why use a number when you can just as easily use a descriptive word. It's good for the user and the search engine.

If you are doing a catalog, do things like category=books for your navigation pages, and item=SEO-book for the individual items. That way, someone looking at the URL will know what the link is to, and it will also make the search engine happier.

Also, if you do use session IDs, turn them off if the user-agent is one of the search engine spiders.

[trimmer80]

IMO.

Leave your site as it is and add in the dynamic pages as a new section of the site. Thus you will be able to test how effective the dynamic pages are in respects to the static pages. This means that any problems that may be encounted will only affect these new pages and not all 10000. When you are happy with the new structure start merging existing files into it.

[wanderingmind]

Trimmer, that could be good idea I agree.

One site I converted from static to URL had a PR of 5. It took a month for the new dynamic pages to get into the index. Meanwhile old pages which were bringing in visitors vanished from the idex, resulting in huge drop in revenues and visitors. Better to keep both options alive till the dynamic pages are in the index, and then remove the static pages.

[BigDave]

wanderingmind,

You should have set it up to do a 301 redirect permanent whenever you moved a page.

It will keeep your traffic from the SE going to the right place, and the PR and traffic from any deeplinks will also find their way to where they belong.

[Sanenet]

Another way to go is to change the URL into a page string, so that page.cfm?id=1 turns into page.cfm/id/1. This worked pretty well for us.

[wanderingmind]

BigDave,

I frankly didnt know how to set 301 redirects for the entire 100,000 static pages to their new dynamic versions.

Is there some simple enough way to do this or am I a total idiot? :-)

(I have a windows NT webserver with IIS)

Or do you mean 301 redirecting all earlier pages to my homepage?

[cayleyv]

Search engine spiders are advanced enough to know to look at content, not page names. Query strings alone will not degrade rankings. However, session ID's WILL hinder spiders. You should sniff for browsers/spiders and not feed session ID's to bots.