Dynamic Web Pages

Dynamic pages consist of pages where the logic is maintained separately from the content. The content is stored in the database until the variable parameters of the dynamic url tells the database repository what items to pull into the page as it loads. Based on the url’s parameters, the server will return different content.

Websites that utilize databases which can insert content into a webpage by way of a dynamic script like PHP or JavaScript are increasingly popular. This type of site is considered dynamic. Many websites choose dynamic content over static content. This is because if a website has thousands of products or pages, writing or updating each static by hand is a monumental task.

Secondly, once you know how to use regular expressions for mod rewrite, you need to decide which dynamic URL you want changed and what it’ll look like when it is changed. In the example above you can see that the pageId, id and start values remain the same in the static URL, this is very important as when the static URL is changed to a dynamic URL on the server (see below) the values are taken from the static URL.

If you’re reading this article, you probably know that Search Engines do not index dynamic URLs as well as they index static URLs. The most popular method of automatically rewriting URLs is called “mod rewrite”. If you are using an Apache server to host your website(contact your web host) then read on. If not then have a look at the mod rewrite article in Wikipedia and read no further.

You can check to see if your rules in your robots.txt file will function correctly by logging into your Google webmaster control panel account. If you don’t have a Google account then you simply need to create one from Gmail, Adwords or Adsense and you’ll have access to the Google webmasters tools and control panel. If you’re wishing to achieve higher rankings then you should have one. Then all you need to do is be logged into your gmail, adwords, or adsense accounts to have an account.

“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 small.

On many websites that include complex search features, dynamic URLs are typically used in the site architecture. From a user perspective, this is not an issue, but it can be a problem for search engine spiders that get caught in large repeating loops as they are trying to index pages. Eventually the spiders time out and leave the site without completing indexing, and also tax server resources as they make multiple database queries in short amounts of time.