Is there still a need for static URLs?

[brucec]

I see the links all over for mod rewrites for static URLs from dynamics for the search engines, but I notice that Google and Yahoo index dynamic URLs with no problem.

Any opinions and help on this is appreciated.

[Jack_Frost]

My understanding is that they will crawl dynamic pages with up to 2 variables. Beyond that, it's hit or miss. I also think that dynamic pages can rank very well, but they need to be created to be algo compliant and most are not.

We've optimized both static and dynamic pages successfully, but I still feel more comfortable going the static route if possible.

[brucec]

All my dynamic URLs are only 1 variable level, namely ids to primary keys in our MySQL database.

Howver, you mentioned "algo compliant". Can you please clarify what that means?

[Jack_Frost]

Typically when someone is building dynamic pages, they are doing it to save time. Consequently, dynamic pages often have the same title and description for all pages, no H1's, no crosslinks, no meaningful alt tags, etc...all of the on page stuff that can rank a page well are ignored.

If you have your database set up with fields for the important on page factors, it will probably do well. I think it was BakedJake that said at his firm they build all dynamic sites but have a spreadsheet with 30-50 columns for all of the on page factors they want to target.

I have optimized a site for a client that had "one variable" dynamic pages and it does incredibly well. In fact, it's a little scary how well it did. On the other hand, I've practically given up on optimizing sites built from canned ecommerce programs. Most offer no flexibility.

Hope this helps...

[ZopeMaven]

> My understanding is that they will crawl dynamic pages with up to 2 variables. Beyond that, it's hit or miss. I also think that dynamic pages can rank very well, but they need to be created to be algo compliant and most are not.

One of the reasons I like Zope as a web development platform is that even though *all* pages are essentially dynamic, they usually have static-style URLs.

Does anyone know if the crawl-depth is different for 'dynamic' URLs than 'static' ones? In my own site's case, the only exception (currently) to the static-style URLs are search result pages, many of which are linked to directly from the home page. The links to these pages only have two variables, but link further (in most cases) using longer multi-variable URLs (ie. to 'Next 20 Results', 'Sort Results by X', etc.)

However, there is one exception. I have a 'browse the archive' page that is one level deep that in turn links to several dozen two-variable dynamic pages. So far, none of these have been indexed, as far as I can tell, unless they are also linked from the front page of the site. The site is still relatively new, so they may be indexed in time, but I was wondering if depth and dynamicity (is that a word?) interact in any way.