I have a complete asp site but will it be found by SE'S?

Im scared the site wont be found

[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

[txbakers]

SEs will read HTML. Your ASP site, although dynamic, produces HTML which is readable by the SE.

In my situation, the actual dynamic pages don't exist without a login, so the SEs won't spider them, but that's fine.

The main site is all I want spidered anyway.

[too much information]

All of my sites are completely ASP and I have no problems being indexed at all. What you do want to avoid is any querystring variables named ID or SESSION or anything similar that may make the bots think that what they are following is possibly different each time it's visited.

[webdevjim]

Mikko,
Agree with the above posts. Although my sites ranking jumped up a few spots when I added static pages for my second level pages and put links to the static pages on the footer of each page.

/WebDevJim

[mikko]

Thanks very much for your help.

I have the index.asp page which includes a menu.asp page which gives the options of my categories. Then when a user selects a category, it opens cat.asp with the list of these options. The user can then click on the image to see a bigger version with a deeper description in product.asp.
Does this sound like it has any "querystring variables named ID or SESSION".

Thanks again

[too much information]

no, you would know the querystring variables because they follow the page name in the url. Something like:

www.somedomain.com/page.asp?ID=78949472

the 'ID' is a querystring variable and is usually not very friendly to most robots. I use querystrings to pass variables all the time with no problems but it is usually something like '?category=' which doesn't seem to cause as many problems.

[mattglet]

mikko-

View the source of your web pages. You will then see exactly what the SE's see.

In IE, click on VIEW, then SOURCE. You will see all your HTML code, which is exactly what matters to the SE.

-Matt

[mikko]

Too much infomration, Ok i think i may have problems then, when i type in for one of the items i get [myurl.com...] in the address bar.
This is not robot friendly is it?
Matt
I checked the source code and it shows each item, its unique code that would identify it and the description which i would hope would be picked up as keywords.
So you think this would be ok or am i in trouble?
Thanks for the advice

[mattglet]

mikko-

I will answer both your above questions with: Yes. You will be fine.

-Matt

[mikko]

Thankyou very much, thats a big sigh of relief