Quick questions about ASP pages

Is that 'OK' to use for SEs?

[stfarm]

I was reading in several post that you shouldn't use dynamic pages and so on. So I got a little confused.
I would like to use .asp pages to use a few scripts, like cookie, time, and so on. but the page itself would NOT be dynamic.
So would that be OK to use? I don't want to 'upset' google, you know what I mean?

Thanks for all your help.

Steve

[diamondgrl]

You're fine.

[sinixstar]

why should you not use dynamic pages? that's the whole point of asp.

[stfarm]

I have a pretty good understanding of ASP, but after reading a lot, about how search engines work, I came accross an article that mentioned that Google and the like do NOT index dynamically generated pages. That's all. Since I will use ASP only for some scripting, I guess I am save.

Thank you for all of your input.

Steve

[raywood]

It's a frequent topic on a few other boards. I don't know why, but there seems to be a lot of folklore or urban legend style stories about the mysteries of google, especially about dynamic pages.

Google is just fine with all the scripting and programming languages with which I am familiar. Php, asp, aspx, all those file extensions get indexed by google without problems. The only thing I know of that makes it choke is a big query string with lots of parameters and lots of characters.

I have hundreds of pages with aspx extension, and google likes them. But I do try to keep my query strings limited to one parameter.

[stfarm]

Thank you very much for clearing that up. I was pretty bummed out that I couldn't use a dynamic language.

One more question so. Can I then use dynamic content, and Google will index it?

Of course I also will keep it to just one Parameter.
And do you know if I can obfuscate my links, or is that not a good idea?

Thank you again for your help.

[raywood]

Yes, you can use dynamic content. Google just sees your pages as html. As a matter of fact, if your pages change frequently, I think google likes them even better. The googlebot seems to come by my pages more often when they change frequently.

For example, I have a site selling products that displays ten products per page. There are around 100 pages most days. All the pages and the total number of pages change as inventory is adjusted each day. All the pages are dynamically generated from a database.

Google seems to love it. The bot comes by almost every day. Uses lots of bandwidth too, but not enough to cost me much money.

On the same site I have news headlines that change often too. Google likes all those pages as well.

I don't really know what the effects are concerning indexing and archiving. I don't spend time trying to search on 1,000's of keywords. But I get lots of traffic from google. My logs show a wide variety of search terms for users coming in to have a look. No way I can optimize for all the wierd search terms. So I'm just sticking with what I have. Dynamically generatd pages = no problem.

[stfarm]

That's good to know. I will start development on that right now. I was hoping I could ask you 2 more questions, not really sure if they belong here.

I use the APF script from MrRat, which is perl, does Google also index those dynamic pages?

Do you know of a good server side RSS aggregator that I could include in my asp pages?

Thank you so much for your help.

[raywood]

I don't use Mr. Rat's script, but I know that it is very popular. I don't see any reason that it would cause trouble with the SE's. It delivers html pages just like any other script.

Sorry, I don't have a recommendation for a RSS agragator.

[raptorix]

Google doesn't have a problem at all with dynamic pages, the only thing you have to realise is that you don't use dynamic urls with stuff like: www.widget.com?session=1325414asdfasdf&page=blah

Because google will see urls with different parameters as different pages, and that's not good.

In that case its smarter to put the session in a cookie.

[raywood]

raptorix, I don't understand why I should not use parameters in my links. I have a 100 page catalog. Each page has forward and back buttons and additional links in between with page numbers. The links look like mysite/products.aspx?page=pagenumber.

Google likes them all. It usually goes to the first page, which is linked from the home page, and just keeps following the forward links. It doesn't seem to get into a loop of going backward and forward, or any other kind of problem.

I get hits from google from people searching on terms buried way inside like on page 50. So I assume google has them all indexed.

I think a big long query string with lots of parameters will cause problems, but one or two parameters seems to be ok. What am I missing?

[mattglet]

raywood-
You're not missing anything. You are correct. One or two (or even 3 or 4 now) parameters is absolutely fine.

raptorix is correct though. You should NOT put session info in your URL if you care about getting good results from a search engine.

[raptorix]

Correct mattglet, for a customer we did build a website which has only one page with a pageid, something like /default.asp?documentid=21343, all pages are being indexed very well, and has extremely good rankings on dutch single word queries.

[raywood]

Ok, now I understand. No session info in a url in a link. I never even thought about doing that anyway. Thanks.

[raptorix]

Most people won't but in the past some systems out of the box did, its a way to avoid the use of cookies and still be able to track sessions.

[beauzero]

asp.net also lets you put session id into what appears to be a directory...
i.e.
www.xyz.com/(1234567fdeg)/default.aspx

not SE friendly either.

btw I have a 5 param catalog and it gets indexed well.
One of the five being pagenumber.

[raptorix]

In ASP.NET there are several ways to track sessions, session, cookie and url as far as i know. I think you can configure that in you web.config.