google friendly design

[jimbodev]

Hi, I am trying to come up with a site design that is google friendly in order to get a decent ranking. I'm the web developer for an online pet supply store. We have a nice site, however, we tend to present ourselves in a graphical way - which i understand does not index as well as straight text but we've tried to help out by using alt="" in our <img> tags. We do NOT cloak or use any of the
questionable tactics that most websites use....it's obvious in our category that most of the top 4 or 5 are cloaking. Another thing that i'm wondering about is the use of Active Server Pages (ASP)...here is a quote from Google's webmaster's guide [google.com...]

"If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a '?' character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them
small".

Does this mean that if i use links like [mydomain.com...] that the robot will not pass the "?id=1234" when crawling my site? If so, does this mean that it only crawls static pages? I'm trying to get a handle on the does and don'ts.....and I don't want to have to resort to the same tactics as all the top ranked sites....however, they really make it tough. Any feedback would be very appreciated!

[hakre]

hi jimbodev,

what google purposes is a good thought (not only for google, for other engines too), but it is not a strict need.

if you don't have got the possibilities to do part of the url mapping on your server, it might be very hard for you, to create pages without the? characters in dynamic webpages.

my experience is, that google will index such kind of pages. it is not a problem. i don't know where google starts to stop indexing query values via get, but a site i know, there are plenty such pages with multiple query string parameters and it works very well with google and it there seem to be no disadvantages in the ranking.

[Digimon]

Nice threads about dynamic pages:
tips to keep dynamic content seach engine friendly [webmasterworld.com]
and
all the information to get your dynamic content indexed [webmasterworld.com]

My 0,02