34 replies to this topic

[cryptblade]

I have a question about Dynamic Pages too and how they are indexed AND ranked.

My big concern is about actual content.

Do SEs rank a page lower if they see that part of its content (over time) keeps changing?

While part of the page is static and will never change, will my efforts be undermined by the fact that part of the page has content that will always change (dynamic)?

Will the ranking itself be undermined by the presence of dyamic copy / content?

The way the site is built, I have dynamic urls with static content - and my understanding is that the dynamic urls should be changed to static urls using a number of techniques like path_name, .htaccess, etc.

Does the ranking get affected by the combination of copy/content I'm going to have (mostly static with some dynamic)?

I would really appreciate help and/or insight - cause I dont want to do all this work and have it be nullified by technology.


(oh these are cute smileys..) - oh... to be him =>

[Jill]

Welcome cryptblade!

Do SEs rank a page lower if they see that part of its content (over time) keeps changing?

Absolutely not.

While part of the page is static and will never change, will my efforts be undermined by the fact that part of the page has content that will always change (dynamic)?

No. But if you have optimized content that you then change for unoptimized content, that could affect your rankings.

Will the ranking itself be undermined by the presence of dyamic copy / content?

Well, I think this is the same question as the two above, and the answer is still no!

The way the site is built, I have dynamic urls with static content - and my understanding is that the dynamic urls should be changed to static urls using a number of techniques like path_name, .htaccess, etc.

No, that's not true. You simply need to make sure that you have links to the dynamic URLs and that a search engine wouldn't have to go through a drop-down menu or search box to find those pages. They haven't learned how to search sites yet!

Dynamic sites are not much different than static ones if you have links to all the pages in your navigation some how.

Hope this helps.

[Randy]

vtownbarries,

How many total pages are on the site? According to a site: search I just did, Google reports having 2,990 pages from the site indexed and I saw some there with as many as 4 modifiers. So I don't think there's a technical problem on that front.

I just took a quick look, but there are some issues.

Anytime you use an onclick event to produce a popup page you're stopping the spiders in their tracks. The individual listings for companies is one such example of this. Bots don't read Javascript links reliably yet. Those pages that can only be accessed via an onclick event simply will not be spidered. Not sure if that's what you want or not.

I would also take a good hard look at the code being used throughout the site and make sure it validates. From my very quick visit it appears that you're making it more difficult than need be, for both spiders and visitors. For instance, have you looked at the site in Netscape? With Netscape 6.2 I can't even get the home page to load!

Overall, it looks like you have a load of pages in the index. Now they may not be ranking well, but with almost 3,000 pages indexed by Google it's fair to say that they're getting indexed. But I would still take a look at the code because you may be losing some visitors using Netscape. Not sure if it's the actual code or something with your server, but it's an issue you should correct.

[ramorse]

I hope I can continue this discussion with my little site.

Here's the specific problem. If I do a site:marcomandpop.com on Google most of the pages are indexed. However, none of the product pages are listed. Examples of the pages not listed:

[http://marcomandpop....m?type=banners]

and most importantly the product detail pages like:

[http://marcomandpop....tail.cfm?id=51]

When I do a similar search on Yahoo, both types of pages are listed.

On MSN, the first one is listed and the second one not.

I know these pages have some problems because they don't have title tags and we're working on that. But that shouldn't prevent them from being indexed at all in Google. I wrote to Google about it but have not heard back...yet.

[Unlinked links per [url=http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?act=boardrules]Forum Rules[/url]. -Randy]

Edited by Randy, 30 September 2004 - 03:17 PM.

[Randy]

ramorse: I just took a very quick look, so grain of salt theory applies...

When I view the source of of the ?type-banners page the links to your details.cfm pages are all wrapped inside Form tags.

If that's the only way to reach your product detail pages the bots won't get there. They don't submit forms. So even though your headline, etc have straight a href tags, they are inside of a form and thus being skipped over.

You can fix that particular non-spidering issue by either removing the Form tags from the text portion of the links or by providing a site map with a clean text link for the bots to reach those pages through.

Someone else will be by later to take a deeper look I'm sure, but that's what I saw in the few minutes I took a gander at your site.

(Nice, clean layout btw! It's fun and not all cluttered like most shopping carts seem to get. Well done on that front IMO.)

[ramorse]

Randy: Thanks. I didn't build this site. It's interesting that the form element would thwart Google but not Yahoo.

I didn't build this site, btw. I have been asked to help market the site and trying to figure out the web developer's template system and why things are the way the are and how to fix them.

[vtownbarries]

Hi Randy,

Thanks I didnt notice netscape cant view the site. I did take a look at some stats and noticed that only about 0.4% of hits are from netscape so its not a trainsmash yet. (I think people in South Africa still only use Microsoft products).

I see what you mean about the popups.
Will it then be better to use <a href ... target="_BLANK"> to have the spider go to that sites as well?

I have noticed that some of these popups get indexed, but only one or 2 ... plus they are templates and all of them have almost the same URL... i assume this does not get indexed then?

With this wide range of areas on the website ... where could i start with a strategy to get high rankings? (Rookie question probably but bear with me as I am new to this).

Thanks for all your time folks!

[torka]

I see what you mean about the popups.
Will it then be better to use <a href ... target="_BLANK"> to have the spider go to that sites as well?

That's one way of doing it, and a fairly foolproof one... the only real problem with that method is that in IE it opens another full-sized browser window on top of the existing window, which might be confusing to people if they don't notice it and simply think that their "Back" button has been disabled somehow. (Less confusing to users of Opera or some Firefox/Mozilla users what with their tabbed interface, but you said most of your visitors were on IE...)

Of course, it's always nice to warn your visitors when a link will be opening a new window. If you do that, it might help mitigate that problem.

Another alternative might be to use the techniques in this article: The Perfect Pop Up. The links will be spiderable, will work for those who have JavaScript turned off, will work for people with pop-up blockers installed, and -- for those who view them as pop up windodws -- you'll still have control over the size and features of the browser window that opens.

--Torka

[ramorse]

ou can fix that particular non-spidering issue by either removing the Form tags from the text portion of the links or by providing a site map with a clean text link for the bots to reach those pages through.

Regarding the marcomandpop.com site where google is not indexing product detail pages: We couldn't remove the form tags on the cataog page, but we did createa site map with straight html links ot each product page. Google indexed the site map page, but the product detail pages are still not showing up.

Anyone have any other suggestions?

[SanDiegoMedia]

Here's my

Dynamic URL's with stop characters can and will get indexed, however static looking URL's seem to get indexed and ranked much easier then their counter parts.

When building your dynamic site, try to build a "sitemap" into your navigation system. Have as many HTML text links in your main navigation as possible. This promotes strong site structure and ease of indexing for the spiders.

Make sure each page has unique titles. This will tell the spiders each page is different (same titles means the page is about the same thing right.) It's very easy to create a function that generates a title based on variables in the database row. Nor is it hard to add a column to the databse to allow you to add custom titles to each page. You can also easily set up a function to check for a custom title, and if not there, display a title based on variables on the page.

Solid content as usual is very important as well. You need to support the products you are selling with content.

You're against most of the odds when you're using a dynamic site, so you have to use as many options as you can in order to beat your compitition.

Examples:
homecontrols dot com
surefire dot com
lovelandpaintballsupply dot com

All dynamic websites that rank very well for the terms they're related to that I've optimized using these same techniques.

[chhchung]

ramorse, nice to see another coldfusion user here.

I have a site using coldfusion as web application.

Most of my product page get indexed by google pretty well.

I use the method to check the internal link - site:www.mydomain.com

274 sites find. Why you don't spider your page?

I changed my site from this

[http://www.mysite.co...ory.cfm?cat=18]

to

[http://www.mysite.co...sale/gifts.cfm]

I suprise that they have good placement on google

[Jill]

Welcome chhchung!

Jill

[tempy]

Hi folks

Google is having a real problem with a site of mine. I use a PHP based tool called 'CuteNews', Which helps me add content. Unfortunately, the pages it generates appear to upset Google'. Whilst never updating *some* pages (even the original 'static' '/page.php'), Google spiders some pages very well (and regularly). However, once I update content and move older content to an 'archive' link, Google gets very confused.

For example the following type of link is regularly returned in results...

http://www.mydomain.com/reviews.php?subaction=showcomments&id=1098962167&archive=&start_from=&ucat=2&

and gives the following kind of error message...

Can not find an article with id: 1098962167

The thing is that the URL that Google has, is one that I had up temporarily (for about a day) and it now refuses to learn that this is wrong or index the real pages (with similarly complext PHP urls). It's a newish site with regularly updated content and I'd like to try and make sure that it is easy to index.

I'm guessing that this fabled mod_rewrite of which you all speak would help me. I'm technical up to a point, but I've not really found a direct answer to what I need to do (or I haven't understood what I have found).

Any suggestions?

[Randy]

My first guess would be then number of modifiers in the URL is having a detrimental effect. 5 is usually a bit much, especially for newer sites.

A question for you on the Cannot find article with id portion.

When you get one of those from the SERPs is the page returning a 200 OK response? If so, you'll be lucky if they ever get totally removed from the index. It would need to send a 404 Not Found server response to trigger getting dropped.

Two ways to handle that one. Either have your error page send a proper 404 Not Found response if the article ID isn't found, or have those attempts sent to some other "main" page.

Unfortunately, I'm not familiar with CuteNews so can't tell you how hard it will be to do either of those things.

[Haystack]

tempy, it sounds to me like the problem is being caused by moving the content. Is there a way you could publish the content to a permanent location from the get-go, then reference that location.

There does appear to be an SEO hack for that news program, so it might be worth checking to see if you have it installed.