will search engine execute our functions

[burhankhan]

Hi:
I have dynamic website with ASP. And each page contains dozons functions. And optimized html code is in that functions.

Will search engine execute my functions, to see HTML code?

Thanks
Burhan

[erus2000]

The answer is a big NOOOOOOOO. SE's don't like Dynamic content.

Suresh Balasubramanian

[burhankhan]

Ok. Search engine will not execute my funtions to see HTML code.

But if i change dynamic extention to Static, then search engine like it. Ok

After using .html instead of .asp, the code in page is still dynamic. Because it is dynamic page and contents are comming from database. Then how SE will see my optimized code, with out executing my functions? (remember SE will not mind, because it is now static page for it)

Thanks
Burhan

[David Wallace]

Actually search engines have no problem indexing dynamic content. There are thousands if not millions of dynamically generate pages in search engine indices. The server is the one the executes the functions anyway so to present a html document to the search engines and user. Therefore search engines do not need to execute functions - they see what the end user sees.

[Robert_Charlton]

burhankhan - It sounds like you might be talking about a form-driven site, where the pages don't really exist until the right form elements have been selected and executed. Search engines won't execute these.

It is possible, though, for you to generate key pages that you'd like to have indexed and then to create site maps with static links to these for the engines to follow.

Generally, though, pages created dynamically have search engine-unfriendly urls. The issue isn't html vrs asp page file extensions... it's the number and kind of parameters in the url, regardless of the extension. Too many parameters will choke most spiders. So these need to be simplified and rewritten by the server. On Apache servers, this is done by mod_rewrite. I forget what's used on Microsoft IIS servers.

On this kind of site, your information architecture and hierachy of links and sitemaps becomes extremely important... and you need to come up with page templates where key optimizing elements like titles and headers and prominent page text can be dynamically generated.

The big mistake a lot of people make on sites like these, I feel, is to try to get every variation of every page spidered. You can only effectively distribute your PageRank so wide or so deep, and, depending upon your inbound links, you may want to save that for your most likely search targets.

If this were a hotel site, eg, someone might search for [placename keyword hotels]. Your forms might allow visitors to select smoking, non-smoking, and search by price range as well, but it's not likely that these variations will be searched, so it may not be a good expenditure of PageRank to target every single variation with your sitemaps and lead the search engines to all these versions of what is essentially one target page.

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

To get back to the original question ...

Functions can be executed either server side or client side. ASP, PHP and script and functions written in other server side languages will execute on the server on the request of a specific URL - no matter who or what requests it. Scripts or functions written in client side JavaScript or other client side scripting languages will execute in the client (browser) if that client is set to do so and support the language. Most normal browsers support JavaScript but most spiders don't.

Spisders often read strings inside a client side script to see if they can find meaningful words or full URLs but they generally do not execute the script.