will my .asp site be viewed?

If not how can i generate files that will?

[mikko]

Hi, i have recently just finished a small project, a web site that links to a database.

Now the menu on the index.asp page is generated links from the database and the full catalogue can be shown in cat.asp but i am worried that search engines will not be able to read the links because they are dynamic. Is this true?
i have 170 products i am trying to advertise and if SE's can't see them its been a waste of time.
Someone said you can generate each of the asp files off into individual files that can be uploaded, anybody got any ideas at all about this?
Thanks in advance

[lty83]

i believe what you want is URI Rewriting, i think thats what its called, it can turn dynamic urls into static pages, which will be indexed and seen by search engines

[King of Bling]

Mikko,

Use site search to look for "mod rewrite" - rewriting dynamic urls so that they look like static pages.

Hope that helps

[rogerd]

Hi, Mikko, welcome to WebmasterWorld. If your dynamic URLs are short and have no session IDs, they should get spidered and indexed. Nevertheless, many webmasters prefer to rewrite anyway, as some believe that the same content on a static page outperforms an equivalent dynamic page with a query string.

I'm guessing you are on IIS rather than Apache, so if that's the case search for ISAPI rewrite (as opposed to mod rewrite) for discussion of software that will do what you want.

If you are on a shared hosting setup, installing server software for URL rewriting may be a problem. If so, consider a custom error page to rewrite your URLs.

[jomoweb]

Mikko,

My site uses ASP-- I have two areas that are dynamic, a dealer locator, and a product catalog.

Here is the kick in the pants-- the dynamic dealer pages are indexed, but not the catalog?! I do have a static page for every item in the catalog as well as a dynamic one, and these are listed. I do know that the main page of the catalog has been generated dynamically and indexed, but the item detail page has not. So it may be generating one page in a series and not going down the dynamically created links.

So the best answer I can give, is that the SE's kind of index dynamic data.

For insurance purposes, you may want to make a static page for each item in your catalog. That is a lot of pages, but if it means sales it will be worth it. The best way I can think to do this is to generate the page, copy the HTML into a new document and save it. However, there may be a better way.

Just submit the site-- when it finally gets listed in the SE, find out what is and isn't in there, so you can get ready for the next time the spider comes around.

[mikko]

Thanks for all the help.
Jomoweb, did you go through each individual item and save it? what did you save it as for it to be picked up by a the dynamic pages?.
I thought using asp would save me sooo much time to avoid going through each page and creating them individually but it looks like i may have to do that?
Thanks

[mikko]

Thanks for all the help.
Jomoweb, did you go through each individual item and save it? what did you save it as for it to be picked up by a the dynamic pages?.
I thought using asp would save me sooo much time to avoid going through each page and creating them individually but it looks like i may have to do that?

I think i may have session ids, heres an example: www.domainname.com/cat.asp?CATID=10 is this one for example, if so i may be in trouble then arrghhh.