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I'm in the early stages of planning a website that promotes goods/services that are to be rented/let.
The site will be databased - so the vast majority of pages will be dynamic. (I am planning to use the mod_rewrite method to aviod any potential querystring problems.)
The problem I am grappling with at the moment concerns the rapid turnover of these pages. Once each item has been let, it will be removed from the database, and the page generated by the server will - from the search engine's perspective - cease to exist.
As we all know, search engines rank pages, not sites. How will I be able to build and maintain ranking if the lifetime of each page is so limited?
Ben
[edited by: caveman at 6:03 pm (utc) on Jan. 23, 2006]
[edit reason] Exemplified. No specifics please, per TOS. [/edit]
Besides, if you think about it, eBay and many other categories of site face essentially the same issue.
The issue you raise is simply something to be built into your planning, with the knowledge that having more pages on the site that remain in place is better than having less that remain in place. So try and make sure you have plenty of pages on the site that remain there permanently, beyond the homepage.
Plus, you can have permanent pages, with changing content, e.g., "This week's featured listing" or featured listing pages broken down by product category, geo, or other relevant break for the particular industry. Newspapers run sites this way, for example (e.g., there is always a main Sports page...just different content day to day.
Make sense?
Ben
