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.

[toddy]

After reading over quickly THIS PAGE (http://www.webconfs.com/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls-article-3.php) I think its more about static or dynamic URLs

If your going to have variable on the end of your URL then yes it will affect your search engine traffic.

I always wondered why a friend of mine who uses IPB used Apache Mod Rewrite to change his dynamic URLs to Static ones.

Im not sure if there is such a thing as Mod Rewrite for Windows hmmmmm....

[FOD]

Google's says:
QUOTE
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 few.
ENDQUOTE

I get all my dynamic pages well indexed - the usually use only one parameter - so I think that all the major seach engines handle them well. I don't see why a (major) seach engine would treat them differently from any dynamic asp, aspx or php page.

Google sitemap stats (I guess we all use this) show all the dynamic keywords and content being picked up and used.

I have no idea what effect this has on page rank.

David.

[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.

- I did find this link... (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40349&ctx=sibling)



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.
Which is an interesting idea I guess.

As for the Windows alternative to Mod_Rewrite... it is possible, a friend of mine uses url rewriting on a couple of his asp websites, I believe its a pain in the neck to do though. http://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GFRC_enGB206GB206&q=windows+url+rewrite

[FOD]

I think the google comment is a little dated (for sure well pre sitemap) and seems to be more concerned with the "are they duplicates" issue.

Most of my site comes from a database and I have a sitemap generator (asp) to expose all the url's to Google via their sitemap. They list them all as seperate pages with unique keywords point to each page.

There are so many dynamic pages out there now - MS has hardly anything else on their site.

David.

[Andrew Taylor]

All of mine are dynamic, but use static URLs which are just blank pages with a php include to the template which includes all of the fancy db stuff

The parts are drawn in via the page name in the address bar, it seems to work quite well (especially on the CMS)

[Nick Irvine]

I had similar concerns a little while ago. I changed all the pages to static, and just placed a little code at the top, something like:


<?php $page_id=4; include ('template.php'); ?>It means all the static pages are very small in size, 50kb and yet they all link to one template so they are still easy to edit.

For a site heavily dependant on a database its easy to implement, just add a little bit of code to add a new page to the admin area which processes the new additions to the database.

Its a lot more search engine friendly. If you want help making the piece of code that generates the pages in PHP let me know I've got a few examples.


p.s that was my 300th post!

[andysears]

A couple of years ago, I had an ASP calendar page I wrote, with the date passed in the URL ?id=01/01/2005 etc.... after a couple of weeks I noticed very heavy google spider traffic, a little while later over 1500 pages indexed, each with a different data on the ?id=