Free Website Promotion, Website Traffic, and SEO Tips

Dynamically generated pages generated from a script file (cgi, PHP, ASP, etc). are generally more difficult for Search Engines to index. However, in most cases the better Search Engines can index dynamically generated pages.

When you see a URL containing special symbols like (“?, &, $, =, +, %”), then the page is probably a page that had been generated from a script.

Most of the better Search Engines will index dynamically-generated pages. However, there are cases where the major Search Engines can have problems indexing dynamic pages. For instance, pages that use session variables are often not indexed by Search Engines. The reason for this is that session variables cause the same text page to appear with a constantly changing URL. Search Engines generally frown upon this.

Also, dynamic web pages with more than three parameters are not always indexed by the Search Engines. Most Search Engines recommend against using more than three parameters in the URL. Parameters look like this:

?param1=value1&param2=value2&param3=value3&param4=value4

The example above has four parameters, which may or may not get indexed. The first parameter on a URL follows the “?” symbol. Any other parameters follow “&” symbols. If it had only three parameters like this:
?param1=value1&param2=value2&param3=value3

then the URL would more than likely be indexed by a Search Engine. However, the best way to ensure that dynamically generated pages get indexed, is to include static links to them on a sitemap. A static link is one that doesn’t change and is found in an anchor tag like this:
four parameter link

If your sitemap contained links like the one above, then the dynamic page that is linked to (in this case http://websitepromotionbook.com/?param1=value1&param2=value2&param3=value3&param4=value4) should be indexed by the Search Engines.

Google’s information for webmasters states “Because our web crawler can easily overwhelm and crash sites serving dynamic content, we limit the amount of dynamic pages we index”. This is one of the more significant problems with dynamic content and another good reason to have a sitemap with links to all of your dynamic pages.