Do static pages really outweigh dynamic pages?

My dynamic pages seem to be doing just fine!

[cscgal]

I run a bulletin board/forum with about 800 individual threads in about 15 forums. Therefore, the entire site is about 900 pages. Recently, I used mod_rewrite to convert my .php looking URLs into static looking .html URLs.

For example,
/forums/viewtopic.php?t=100
was converted into
/forums/t100.html

Currently about 65% of my visitors come from search engines. When doing a site search at google, I found about 400 of my 900 or so pages were indexed (the php version of course, as I just implemented the html version the other day).

Was it really worth it for me to convert my site over to HTML URLs? All of the threads use only one variable in the URL (e.g. php?t=80 or php?t=500). I read that google usually indexes dynamic pages with one or two variables.

It's all said and done now, but I am just wondering whether it was worth it in your opinion. Google already has 400 of my php pages already in its index, afterall.

Note that with mod_rewrite, both the HTML as well as the PHP versions of each page are accessible, though all navigation/links throughout the site use the html version.

[DaveN]

a site which google had been crawling for over 6 months had 47 dynamic pages in the database, we used a rewrite program and know after the last crawl there are just over 2200 pages indexed.

Dave

[shasan]

question here... so does the mod_rewrite just generate an HTML page where there would have been a php page? i.e. you have both viewtopic.php and t100.html?

[jpjones]

Nope, mod_rewrite maps requests for files in one directory format to an actual physical file on the filesystem of the server.

E.g. /prod/10
would be mapped to
/products.php?id=10

I am just wondering whether it was worth it in your opinion. Google already has 400 of my php pages already in its index, afterall.

Its worth it for Google (I similarly converted a dynamic site with .php extensions into static-looking pages), and it's worth it for every other spider out there. Not all of them are as clever (or brave) as googlebot for spidering dynamic urls.

JP

[gbaker123]

I switched to a mod_rewrite way of doing things and shortened my paths and got rid of very long URL variables. As a result I have over 150,000 pages crawled and likely indexed by google.

My two cents.

George

[cscgal]

Here's another problem of mine. I worked hard to get my .php pages to have a google PR of about 6. About four days ago I switched over to .html via mod_rewrite. Since then, every single .html page (including the homepage and forum index) have a 0/10 PR. Plus, they're still not indexed in any search engines. I'm getting sorta worried about this.

I used CyberspaceHQ AddWeb 6 software to submit the index.html page to a whole slew of search engines and directories. In addition, I paid the $39 to have Inktomi index forums.html within 48 hours. This takes care of my two main pages: index.html (the homepage) and forums.html (the board index). I'm going to just leave everything be now and hope that the rest gets spidered. However, I'm pretty worried because it's been much more than 48 hours and still absolutely NOTHING!

Am I just being overanxious?

[gsx]

They would be PR0 - they have a different page name and are therefore a differnt page to the search engines. Four days is not long enough for a search engione to update its listing - try about 4 months for some, longer for others. Google and Inktomi will be quicker, probably 2-8 weeks.

Inktomi paid inclusion does refresh every 48 hours (only on average!) but the first time can take 7-10 days to be included for some reason.