Static or Dynamic... does it matter?

[boomers]

Hey there chaps... after a few people to throw in a few opinions (and preferably knowledge) to this question: Does it make a difference to search engines if my pages are static .html pages or dynamic .aspx pages?

I wouldnt have thought so because I made a site which gets looked at by Google on a regular basis and gets a decent amount of search engine traffic and that is dynamic pages. - However at the moment im in the process of making another website and Ive been told that static html pages are treated nicer by search engines.

So instead of the traditional type of site that basically uses query strings on the same page to get different content... I was thinking about making some sort of generating script that would gather all the data from my database and actually *make* the various static .html pages. Of course one of the nice things about it would be how 'easy' things would be on the CPU that my site is hosted on

But this is a fair amount of work and to be honest it probably wouldnt be worth it if search engines didnt particularly appreciate static pages over dynamic ones.

 

[peet]

I read somewhere that search engines can fail to interpret php includes and other code correctly, and therefore dynamic pages can be left unindexed cos all the code at the top causes them to halt their indexing. I also read that the SEs are getting round this now.

So it sounds like if your cms uses simple code and not too excessive, then the SEs should cope OK.

 

[Keral_Patel]

I read somewhere that search engines can fail to interpret php includes and other code correctly, and therefore dynamic pages can be left unindexed cos all the code at the top causes them to halt their indexing. I also read that the SEs are getting round this now.

So it sounds like if your cms uses simple code and not too excessive, then the SEs should cope OK.

Well this is not true. You can use 100 php includes in one page and it doesn't matters the SE's are only going to see the HTML version of the page. Now how you output the HTML version from the server side scripting is your choice.

I can out put a 100 line HTML with 20 includes in it and then also it is going to show 100 line HTML code.

Or I can do the same without includes. But the effect is 100 lines of HTML code which will remain same.

 

[boomers]

I have to admit I would be suprised if it was an unintentional thing on the part of search engines, these things have some amazing programmers behind them and I dont believe that those same programmers would not be able to make the search engines see (and like) dynamic pages.

So I was thinking that if it was true then it was by design as oppossed to fault.

 

[Keral_Patel]

I think this might be the answer to your question.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35287&query=.html&topic=&type=

 

[boomers]

Thanks for the link Nick, an interesting paragraph taken from Googles Webmaster Help Center

Consider creating static copies of dynamic pages. Although the Google index includes dynamic pages, they comprise a small portion of our index. If you suspect that your dynamically generated pages (such as URLs containing question marks) are causing problems for our crawler, you might create static copies of these pages. If you create static copies, don't forget to add your dynamic pages to your robots.txt file to prevent us from treating them as duplicates.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40349&ctx=sibling

An interesting idea.

 

[squatter]

What about links from forum pages?

 

[boomers]

What about them? - I dont understand what youre asking?

 

[shahzad11]

links from forum pages are count only as one link in the forum

 

[Waiter]

What about links from forum pages?

Many forum pages are SEO friendly.