Dynamic Content, Would This Work..

[saiine]

I appreciate any help you guys can offer regarding this topic. I've searched the archive and was unable to locate an answer. Suprising, because this is probably pretty common.

I have a page with many links, roughly 1,500. I now want to manage those links in a database through SQL and serve them up via Cold Fusion or ASP.

Will this effect my SEO? I read Googles paragraph on generated content. They warned of having many parameters, such as. test.cfm?state=ca&city=sd, but even with that, what has everyones experience been with this?

Again, thanks.

[colossus]

Here's what I'm going thru right now. We have a very large dynamic site with up to 5 GUIDs in the querystring and each parameter follows the convention {Entity}ID (ex. AreaID, SchoolID). All the major search engines are indexing the site (Google, MSN, Yahoo) and we have over 11,000 pages indexed by Google. But google is stripping one of our querystring parameters from the url (the parameter name is SSID). I have tried changing the name of the parameter to no avail. I even have submitted an xml sitemap to google but still the same problem. I finally had to create a default value for the parameter so that google would stop indexing our error page.

From what I have read and experienced avoid querystrings if you can. You can use mod_rewrite if you are using apache. If you are using IIS there are some ISAPI filters which have been written to provide the same functionality. This will allow you to take the following url:

test.asp?state=ca&city=sd

and change it to one of the following:

test.asp/california/sandiego
test/california/sandiego.htm
test/ca,sd.htm
test-ca-sd.htm
test-california-sandiego.html

This will make your urls look static and then the mod_rewrite will pass the urls to your application in the format you need. Plus the added benifit is that now your urls can contain keywords.

If you need to have querystrings, avoid the convention {Entity}ID like the plague, and keep the values simple. If your database uses GUIDs, only use them for udpates, on public pages where you aren't updating anything make sure that each record has an integer key or something short and simple that you can use in your querystring.