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However the hosted shopping cart solution creates a dynamic site for you with asp.
They have a service which will take your dynamic website and publish it out into a static html catalog. My question is this: I know that SE's now can and do index and rank dynamic pages. Will having this static catalog cause me duplicate content issues since the product descriptions will be identical? Should I take advantage of this service, or should I just stick to trying to get the dynamic site ranked?
Thanks for your feedback! Alex
I think that you will be dealing with duplicate content problems if you have both an HTML and a dynamic version of the same pages.
If you think the HTML will do better than the dynamic pages, you could always use robots.txt to disallow the dynamic pages, which would solve the dup content problem.
OTOH, my experience is that dynamic pages will be indexed if there aren't too many parameters.
One advantage of static pages is that you might be able to tweak some elements that you couldn't using the dynamic solution. For example, you could put in unique page titles if the cart normally doesn't allow that. Of course, that means more maintenance.
I'm not sure why they are pushing this service so much. The CEO is actually a pretty well know member here and I've seen her at pubcon.
What this html catalog basically does is take build a static site map which is pulled from your product titles and descriptions.
So it's basically a site map, but it will have text identical to each of the item pages.
Is the fact that it will be in a different navigation format and multiple items to a page make less succeptable to a duplicate content penalty, or it doesn't matter since the text is identical?
Thanks!
