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My site has a dynamic backend asp shopping cart system, which consists of approximately 1500 products. The developers of this system have add a facility to generate individual standard html pages for each of these products which all sit in the root of the site. These page are not doorway pages they are all unique content pages for the given products in the database and they all look identical to their asp counterpart. When these pages are generated automatically by the system it also generates a master directory/hallway page listing all of the links to these pages.
Obviously the reason these pages are created is for 100% html compliance with the search engines, but what I want know is will Google index these pages from the master hallway page if I add a link to it from my home page?
Many thanks,
Dean
Google will follow the link but the alot of the potential value of these pages will be lost if they are only linked from a hallway page. From what you have described, these pages will inheret 2 levels lower PR than your index,Best actually to link them internally throughout the site, from the dynamic pages and also cross link the flat files and some from the index, in order to distribute PR more evenly and effectively.
I would turn it around. As Conor points out Google won't list the doorways well if they don't get good links, I would also try to avoid duplicates.
I prefer to create some proper category pages (hallways) and link them from the home page instead of the ASP pages (which have session Ids in the links?).
Then, link from the static pages to the ASP only when you need to (eg. add to basket). The ASP pages link to each other, not the static HTML and are forbidden by robots.txt
This gives casual browsers (people and search engines) the robot friendly version, with a robots.txt banned section for those who need tracking. There can be performance benefits too, as you're not parsing the content for requests by casual visitors who don't need tracking yet.
A hybrid approach is to make both sets of URLs dynamic, with one set having clean URLs and the second set robots.txt protected. This allows you to track the referer for those visitors with cookies enabled, but track purchases for visitors whether they have cookies or not.
Just to add a little more info. There are 12 subcategories within our store. Every subcat has it's own hallway page, also every html page has a link back to it's subcat and the master hallway pages.
Would you recommend adding links from my home page to the subcats and not the master hallway?
