Static Page Providers

[chrish]

This question may have been posed before so please pardon the repetition.

How many of you have utilized a service similar to<edited>, where an SEO provider re-creates a static version of a dynamically generated website?

Is this something the engines approve of?

I&#8217;ve seen incidents where both the static and dynamic version was indexed by Google, with little to no difference in template design or content. The only notable difference was the URL string.

Example:
The same product page is indexed in Google under the following URLs:

product_detail.jsp?ASSORTMENT%3C%3East_id=2534374302023689&FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=2534374302025632&PRODUCT%3C%

&

Product/mywidget.asp

Although Google and the other major engines have not weighed in on this subject, I am curious to know what the general consensus is.

[edited by: tedster at 7:41 pm (utc) on May 2, 2006]
[edit reason] remove specific service name [/edit]

[cyberprosper]

I have never used such a service. Why not just do it yourself? You can download your whole site with one of those offline downloaders (WinHTTrack does the trick and is free).

[tedster]

Some of the healthiest ecommerce sites I work with are set up in this way -- a database stores the information, but a script then generates static pages from the template+stored information.

When page content rarely changes, it never made sense to me to use dynamic server technology and create the same page on the fly, over and over agin every time it's requested and each hit requiring a new db query. And given the problems that all search engines have had historically with obviously dynamic urls, using a database+script to create static pages makes a whole lot of sense to me.

I wasn't aware that there were third party services available -- now I see that there are -- but I agree, why not do it yourself? I can tell you, it's a good thing and you can totally control the duplicate url issues the way you want to.