Forum Moderators: open
I have a commercial site that has various sub pages by country.
I made them .asp pages so that I could centrally control various aspects of them without having to go into each one seperately.
The links from the home page are like http://www.homepage.com/american_car_hire.asp
Will Google be able to index them? I read on their site that they have problems with dynamically generated pages - does this mean any .asp page?
Great threads in here, wish I had found this site ages ago.
Cheers
page has direct links to it and is a Govt information site. Well done google for weeding out all the blatant *** sites for this keyword and putting them further down, most of the top results are serious sites. But has this page been generated off line and saved as a static page? Probably..
The rest competative?! Overture searches in April
Java jobs #6 dynamic 1310 searches - pathetic
Buy music #5 dynamic 11,711 searches - way down the list of used search terms, so noone is targetting it.
buy #9 and #10 dynamic 21,653 searches - pointless
sale #19 dynamic 69991 searches - pointless
Blouse #9 dynamic 7423 searches - pathetic
news #5 dynamic - Google site page! 675483 searches
Let's face it, these searches are not going to pick up decent traffic who may be serious about buying something.
Are these really the finest examples of asp results?!
AND, are all .asp pages that do well in fact created offline and saved as static?
(I'm just throwing out the gauntlet here, not meaning to be over aggressive!)
But, as far as I know, Google CANNOT extract any meta-data from these pages. So being indexed is a complete waste of time if you're going for keyword visibility.
If anyone has any live examples of meta-data from these types of pages, being indexed, (and showing up in the SERPS) please list them here.
The main part of each of my sub pages is a block of text relating to the location the client is enquiring on. As someone else maintains this I put it in a text file for them to maintain, I then read the text file and build it into the HTML.
Do you think that Google can/will handle that? Should I get it all 'hardcoded' into the various pages?
Does Google only see the client-side of the code or does it look at the server-side?
(gonna miss the dance, I can feel it. Left at the bus stop again.)
Google cannot see server-side, only client-side so your methodology seems sound.
Not sure how important meta data is in the grand scheme of things, but we use a meta database (server-side) and Url replacers to build our dynamic stuff for Google - works like a charm ;)
Regarding your original question and the "asp" extension, Brett ran a report awhile back on quite a big sample of google results and "asp" extensions took up a very very small % of the results. Debate centred around whether this was more indicative of the fact that their werent many asp pages out there as opposed to a penalty being associated with that extension.
Personally, I see no problems regarding the asp extension - however, on IIS you can set up .htm files to be processed by asp.dll under the configuration section.
(edited by: pete at 9:56 am (utc) on May 24, 2002)
<pause>
Let me repeat that,
Google can extract from the page whatever you put in.
There are a few points to consider:-
Having a "one page does all approach" will lessen your chances. Better to build more pages that pull specific data out of the database.
These pages should be treated just the same as any static page, with title, description, tags, and so on. However, these could be drawn from the database rather than being hard coded.
It has been suggested that PR plays a role in whether a dynamic page will be indexed and I tend to agree.
The basic premise is that it doesn't really matter whether the page is dynamic or static, as long as it is well constructed.
How do I know this......
Onya
Woz
Even though the pages might not get indexed I now understand that they should get indexed.
Reading all your answers makes it clear to me that I will NEVER be the Lord Of The(googles) Dance.
All the best
If your page is dynamic, these may be pulled from the database, and then end up on the page displayed (I think !)
But that doesn't help Google get to the crucial keywords - it just won't see the text !
As far as I know, the only way around this is to duplicate the content in a static (HTML) page.
Lots of work and lots of hassle if you have a large product range :-(
Rule of thumb, if you right click and view the page. thats what the spider will see. (client-side)
There is nothing stopping you pulling customizable data from a database and including it in such a way so that it is fed on by the spiders. It could be title tags, ,meta tags, header 1 tags e.t.c As long as its server side you will be fine!
hope this helps :)
Someone asked what the limit to the number of pages it'll index. I'm not sure, it may have to do with overall site size, but for me at roughly a million pages, it's about 40,000.
G.
Dynamic pages used wisely are filtered results for specific information. They are not ment to be huge content filled pages ( unless they are forum or blogger results). We should be learning that YES Google crawls dynamic pages and YES they can be returned in serps.
