Static HTML vs. Database driven Web Sites

[Ant1981]

Hey all,

First off, thanks for all the info and suggestions I've been able to gleam from all the forums and postings I've read. I'm new to the industry and they've ben very helpful so far!

My question is this, we have a client who currently has a database driven website, I believe they use Active Server Pages. They are thinking about switching over to a completely static .HTML based web site because they believe it will increase their ability to be found through web searces. Does anyone have an idea or benchmark of what they could expect to gain in terms of web-site traffic by making this switch? Any suggestion on how to go about analyzing their go/no-go decision would be greatly helpful.

Thanks!

Anthony

[seomike]

You should look into ISAPIrewrite www.isapirewrite.com. Using this mod rewrite software on IIS will allow you to change the code on your clients site to output a static url.

The server will then rewrite the static url back to it's dynamic form on the backside. All users/SE's will see static pages vs. dynamic. There is some programming, planning url structures and set up involved. But it allows the client to keep the best of both worlds.

[fulton savage]

Database driven pages usually hurt a site's ranking because of the URLs involved with pages that communicate with each other.

Robots struggle with "queried" pages, pages that have URL arguments.

If a database driven site uses a DB only to grab content, and its pages don't use URL arguments, a robot will have no idea the DB is involved because all server side processing is completed before the page is sent to the user.

Try and keep a 1 to 1 relationship between your pages and your files. When you get into having one file that displays different content based on how you get to it or what data you pass to it, a SE robot will trip over it.

[farees]

Hi Anthony,
How many pages does this site have. I always opt for a database driven website if it has more than dozen pages and has some kind of a catalog.
Search engines have gotten smarter over the time and dynamic pages are get indexed at about the same rate.

Using re-writes is an excellent way to overcome any issues if there are any. I have had very good results using Google Sitemaps. If your client can afford look up Ektron's (http://www.ektron.com/) for a decent SE friendly website management systems.

A lot of it also depends on the internal navigation of the site (this is specially true in case of a database driven website).

- Farees