Dynamic or Static

What is the current thought?

[gniver]

I will be overseeing the development of 2 sites. One will be static and SE optimized. The other will be password protected.

A coworker was at the SE conference last week and tells me that a panel stated that the spiders can now index dynamic sites about as well as they can static ones. The panel felt that there was not a real SE disadvantage to building a dynamic site. That's not what I've been hearing. Any comments? Thanks.

[robotsdobetter]

As far as ranking gos there is no difference whether they are Static or are dynamic. Robots can have problems spidering dynamic URLs. Not all search engine's robots can spider dynamic pages, but Google, Yahoo! and MSN seem to have no major problem with this.

One way to improve spidering is by linking (You could start be creating a site map.) to dynamic URLs from static pages.

[jorj]

I was doing a research recently to find out which way is better when setting up a site regarding the names of the files. What I did was to setup a php hidden by a .htaccess so it will be linked to the following types of requests:

/seo-firm/
/seo-firm/seo-firm.html
/seo-firm/index.php

I have linked all three from the first page of my site in the order above, using the same text inside the <A> tags and set an autmated email so I know who and when visits those pages.

Here are the results (since March 4th):
- all spiders requested all three links
- MSN visited on 5th, Google on 6th and by now (11th) they did not return
- Google's cache for my site and those words shows only the index.php file (! surprise!)
- MSN's cache shows '/seo-firm/' only

Conclusion : Where is my html page?