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Dynamically created pages and Google's new way
to deal with them
Dynamically created web pages often cause problems with
search engines. If your web pages are dynamically created,
it's likely that many search engines have difficulty to index
them.
Why have search engines problems with dynamically
created pages?
Many search engines don't like dynamically created pages
because they might get in an infinite loop if they follow
some dynamically created pages.
Google has an official statement about this in its webmaster
guidelines:
"If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL
contains a "?" character), be aware that not every
search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as
static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and
the number of them few."
What did Google change?
Until November, Google had the following statement in
its webmaster guidelines:
"Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as
we don't include these pages in our index."
This entry has been removed from Google's guidelines.
Here's the official statement from Google's
blog:
"[Google now indexes] URLs that contain that parameter.
So if your site uses a dynamic structure that generates
it, don't worry about rewriting it -- we'll accept it
just fine as is.
Keep in mind, however, that dynamic URLs with a large
number of parameters may be problematic for search engine
crawlers in general, so rewriting dynamic URLs into user-friendly
versions is always a good practice when that option is
available to you.
If you can, keeping the number of URL parameters to
one or two may make it more likely that search engines
will crawl your dynamic urls."
What does this mean to your web site?
If you have a dynamically created web site that uses only
one or two parameters to create web pages then it's likely
that Google can index your web pages without problems.
If you use more parameters then you should rewrite
your URLs. Rewriting your URLs makes sure that most
search engines will be able to index your site.
If you cannot rewrite your URLs then it helps if at least
one stable link points to a dynamically created page. If
a web page can be found through a direct link then it is
more likely that search engines index that page.
If you want to find out how Google's search engine spider
sees your web pages, take a look at IBP's search engine spider
simulator. The
spider simulator is available in IBP's free demo version and
it allows you to check your web pages with any search engine
spider.
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