Re: Dynamic Pages and Google ???

Jon Shoberg wrote: > So I was having a conversation with a manager/educator in the IT Industry :) > > In a discussion concerning search engines he stated how he dislikes dynamic > web pages (PHP/ASP/JSP/CFM) because search engine spiders 'choke' on dynamic > content or gives those pages a lower ranking. I can't see this as being > true. I epically can't see the search spider "choking" on dynamic pages > returning well-formed/valid HTML. > > Any thoughts? Each spider is different, and they've changed over time. Often they don't index a page that has a ? in it - they definitely won't be able to follow form input tags and such - the possibilities for input are limitless. Some can follow blah.com/index.php?alh=fff and links of that nature. If you've got redirects in there,tho, they'll often choke on those. Apache has an advantage over IIS because you can normally pass in parameters in the $PATH_INFO area - http://www.blah.com/index.php/blag/222/dsfsd/dlkjsdf calls the index.php with /blag/222/dsfsd/dlkjsdf as parameters you can grab in your script. IIS doesn't allow for this. :( (not natively anyway) Some search engines wouldn't FOLLOW a ? in a link, but will accept one as a 'submitted page' to index if you submit it manually. Again, all of this information is necessarily vague. What works one year doesn't work the next. This was all info and experienced gleaned while building keywordcount.com a few years ago - the whole landscape has changed, and getting 'indexed' by search engines is nice, but imo can be a big waste of time and money given that there are many factors beyond your control entirely. SEOs will bash me upside the head for that one, but it's been my experiences over the past couple years. :)