Making Dynamic and E-Commerce Sites Search Engine Friendly

[seomagnet]

The title of this thread is from an article found on this site Search Engine Watch.. http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/2161081

I have to disagree with most methods of getting around dynamic to static posts because most of them are focused around php based websites.

Since most dynamic sites use a database backend, some technology such as ColdFusion can be written in such a way to take dynamic data or a complete dynamic ecommerce store and can write the entire site out as static. As a former hobby CF Developer, I had already used this method before.

With PHP, you would need to write a frontend using wget or curl to fetch the content pages, following all internal links and such and then you would need a method to write the content as static. I'm not a php programmer so this is just based on thought.

ColdFusion however allows forms and other dynamic features like sessions and cart functions to still work in static generated pages. However, It's been awhile since I tested this since I no longer mess with any website programming.

If anything, maybe this will give some of you ideas that go beyond the .htaccess rewrite methods. As I mentioned earlier, If you backend uses a database, it's not really that hard to write a script to pull content into a template and write your db as real static html.

Just my thoughts,
Chris

[SanDiegoSEO]

Why would you need to create static files when leaving the info in the DB and making sure your URL's and template are SEO friendly is so easy? Why not just leave it as dynamic?

[seomagnet]

>>Why not just leave it as dynamic?

Because not all search engines support dynamic sites or sites with = or ? in the urls. Google is better but static sites still rank much better because the majority of dynamic sites that use templates are not fully web standards compliant, use to much javascript or have code issues to being with.

I only use static sites. But my reply was mainly in regards to the fact that all posts on forums or articles about turning php to static is done by faking the search engines by use mod rewrite or .htaccess files to achieve this. I just never understand why no one just generates static pages.

Craigslist.org is one of the biggest php/mysql sites that I know of. Using cron, they generate the entire site, hundreds of thousands of pages as static html.

I just don't see why other people can't see beyond the web method of .htaccess is all. There are other ways to do things.. This forum on searchenginewatch could be 100% static html.. Easier on server load, more indexable, ect, ect, ect..

Was just my thoughts,
Chris

[SanDiegoSEO]

Becuase changing it in the htaccess file is so simple. Why have a need to run a cron job every time you create a new file? I very much doubt craigslist outputs ALL of their files to static pages. This URL: sandiego.craigslist.org/search/boa?query=bass&minAsk=min&maxAsk=max

Tells me they're using a rewrite of some sort as well.

There are obviously more ways to skin the task. Running a cron job still takes server resources does it not? If the job is running regularly, what about the time between runs? Do pages not get created static?? Is the cron job running continuously?? That would surely use server resources.

[Tlaserx]

Optimizing is about, ehmmmm, Optimizing. If you want a less than optimal way of doing things, leave things in dynamic pages.

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

Optimizing a dynamic website is basically about two things: Getting indexed and getting ranked. The fact that a website is driven from a database really has no influence on either. However, the format you chose to output your content in has.

None of the major search engine have problems with simple dynamic URLs - URLs with a few paremeters. With a lot of parameters, very long URLs, or certain kinds of values they do however get "confused" and sometimes drop crawling and indexing of parts of the site or the entire site. Rewriting URLs can help fix that part of the problem and get you crawled and index. But thats all. Optimizing a dynamic website is much more than just making URLs search engine friendly.

Next step is optimization for better rankings. In this phase a dynamic website is much better than a static. You can do so much on a dynamic website with automation of titles, META-data, cross linking, updating and rotating of content etc. Much more than you can easily do on a static site.

> static sites still rank much better

In that case you must be doing something wrong. In my experience a dynamic website can outrank any static website any day. There are simply so much more you can do to optimize a dynamic website - that is, if you know how to and do it.

Replicating content in static files is in my mind the last solution I would use and I only use it if nothing else is possible.