SE's and Dynamic sites

Does this work?

[kris]

To preface this statement I have to say am fairly new to dynamic sites. We have been reluctant to make the switch for fear of losing our great rankings. It is now evident that a switch from htm to asp is inevitable and welcome.

I recently read that a dynamic site (asp) will be read by SE as plain html with a single line of code on the server side. Something along the lines of <page=mypage.htm>. I was told that the SE will never see the ASP, only the page after the fields are populated by the SQL database. How exactly is this done? Do SE penalize for this sort of thing? It isn't cloaking.

I welcome any knowledge or input you may have on this subject.

[txbakers]

I have heard that SE's don't like pages with ? in the URL, and most of my ASP pages have this.

[Black Knight]

ASP is server-side - thus all turned into content before it is even served to the spider usually. The only common issue with dynamic sites is that of having query strings (question marks) in the URLs to pass variables (such as session IDs) between pages.

I've personally been involved in making some ASP sites spider-friendly by removing the query strings, and have seen excellent results in terms of increased position and referrals from search engine listings.

Do a few searches for URL +re-write +ASP and you should find all you need to get started.

Ammon Johns

[kris]

The page would not have a ? in the url. It would look something like this:

[mydomain.com...]

The page would be dynamic but the one line of code, <page=mypage.htm>. would make it so there is no ? and it would appear to the spider like straight html.

Thanks for the info BK.

[Filipe]

It's a load of hooey if you ask me. I have a site that googles has indexed 10,000 of it's pages... about 99% of which have question marks in the URLs.

[kris]

I think google is the exception rather than the rule. What about others like Ink, Alta and Fast? In my experience, at least in my industry, sites and pages that end in htm and don't have ? in the url represent about 95% of the results. I would much rather be safe than sorry.

[korkus2000]

I have seen Ink, altavista, google, and fast all crawl dynamic content with no problems. The ? is no problem with most SE. I think this is a rather old issue.

[nwilson]

Not sure how to do it in ASP but if you have to have a url pass variables like this:

www.somesite.com?article=34&author=4

you can easily work it in php so that it reads

www.somesite.com/articles/34/4 using Apaches 'look back' feature and a nice function to 'explode' the url into it's component parts.

I'm sure you could do the same with ASP .....

Nick