Does Bot Read Dynamic as Static

Tricky Trick

[georaza]

My questions from technical gurus is that does search engin's BOT/Spiner can differenciate static and dynamic page.
We usually do modrewrite to make search engine friendly. Does SE consider it as static page or dynamic?

[georaza]

For exmaple [webmasterworld.com...] is seemed as static page it could be dynamic if "php" is the file which displays "/3058495.htm" in URL...?

[barns101]

There are various ways in which a search engine bot (or any visitor) could find out whether a page is likely to be dynamic or static.

Firstly the file extension. If it's PHP then the page could very well be dynamic, if its HTML then it is less likely. As you know, someone could use mod_rewrite to make a dynamic script appear to be a static HTML page. You can then look at the server headers (visitors including SE bots can see these). Many servers will reveal whether they are running PHP in the headers, like this:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK 
Date: Thu, 24 Aug 2006 11:18:26 GMT 
Server: Apache/1.3.36 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a PHP/4.4.2 mod_perl/1.24 
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.2 
Connection: close 
Content-Type: text/html 

That's the header from one of my dynamic pages that uses mod_rewrite to appear static. From that you can see that I'm using PHP, although that still doesn't prove for sure that the page is dynamic, only that it uses PHP code.

[jatar_k]

>> can differenciate static and dynamic page

I don't understand why it matters if they can or not.

If we are talking about ranking pages then that is slightly different. Pages need to be spiderable to rank, whether they are dynamic or static doesn't matter. Search engine friendly urls is the key, not how the content of the page is generated.

as for WebmasterWorld urls, they are rewritten

[the_nerd]

If we are talking about ranking pages then that is slightly different. Pages need to be spiderable to rank, whether they are dynamic or static doesn't matter.

true today. but tomorrow?

you can dynamically serve up trillions of different pages with the help of mod.rewrite. and some scarped garbage. You cannot create trillions of static pages on your server, just because its hard disk is limited. So there might be a good reason for SEs to now if a page is dynamic or not.

[jatar_k]

they don't have to be static, they just have to appear static

doesn't matter whether a page is dynamic

I think you are specifically referring to urls

>> you can dynamically serve up trillions of different pages with the help of mod.rewrite. and some scarped garbage.

of course and those trillion pages can all have static urls (no query strings)

[the_nerd]

of course and those trillion pages can all have static urls (no query strings)

of course they can. But from a search engine perspective it might be very interesting to know if they actually ARE static or just PRETEND to be by means of mod.rewrite.

[topr8]

but what is static and what is dynamic,

if static means that the page is served as is on the server disc then i can't imagine any site of any size is like that, at the very minimum they are using includes for the common parts - even just a footer/header.

[Romeo]

Server: Apache/1.3.36 (Unix) mod_gzip/1.3.19.1a PHP/4.4.2 mod_perl/1.24
X-Powered-By: PHP/4.4.2

Apache2 and PHP5 can easily hide this information,
just sending a plain 'Server: Apache' and leaving out the X-Powered-By-line completely.

but what is static and what is dynamic

It does not matter, because dynamic pages may look as being static, if done right.

This link [webmasterworld.com...] looks static, doesn't it? But we all know it is a dynamic page generated out of database content and content changes whenever a new item gets appended.

Kind regards,
R.