indexing dynamic content

How can dynamically generated content be best indexed?

[sichen1234]

We have, like many people, a dynamically generated website, so the search engines cannot crawl deep into the site. Through a site map we were able to get all of our pages indexed, but this site map does not originate from our home page. Since our home page is in several major directories, would pages indexed from the home page achieve better ranking than those indexed from another page (unknown) page on our site?

In other words, is it worth it to reconfigure one's server to allow deep crawling of dynamic pages, or is a separate site map good enough?

[msgraph]

All my large sites are generated offline using a DB to html program. That being said, I can't recommend reconfiguring your server and pages since I do not run any pure dynamic sites.

SE's have always recommended developers to use site maps whether the sites are dynamic or not. Whether you reconfigure or not, create a sitemap and link to it from the home pages as well as other pages within.

On the reconfiguration part, I'd search around here for some more info. Similar questions have popped up on numerous occassions with other members laying out great answers.

[brotherhood of LAN]

The general idea is to get the dynamic content to look like static content, then the bots should have no quams in spidering your info.

Most use mod_rewrite, so you can change

your_page.htm?id=99
to
99.htm or /99/page.htm or abc/99.htm etc etc

as far as your db is concerned, it carries on as normal. You'd just have to add a few lines of code for the mod_rewrite and perhaps change all the URL's you use on your site to point to the new static pages and take advantage of the whole idea.

Highly recommend checking out some of the old mod_rewrite threads for solutions....