I am just abut to update one of my websites so that it is more readable to search engines. Currently my pages are completely dynamic, so there is one product page and an ID is fed into the page displaying the relevant product based on the ID.
This has not worked so well on the search engines, in fact my product pages have never been indexed. What I am planning to do is stay dynamic, although I will have a page for each product, with a function called displayProduct and the id for that product. This page will be generated as part of the new product setup routines. That way each product will have its own page within the site.
My question is will the search engines prefer this method? I am planning on storing all meta information in the database relating to each product also. Will search engines robots actually wait until my page generates the PHP to produce the html output and index that, or will it simply just read the file as is (i.e just see the display product function).
Any help here would be much appreciated.
By the way I use PHP/MySQL and this particular site has around 50 products that need to be searched on.
This Question has been solved and asker verified All Experts Exchange premium technology solutions are available to subscription members.
Experts Exchange has been collecting answers to technology questions since 1996…3 million and counting! If you have a question, chances are we already have your answer.
If you can't find the exact answer you're looking for, ask our exclusive community of 50,000 experts. You’ll get a personalized answer from a trusted professional.
Thousands of free tech tips, tricks, how-to’s and tutorials are available in our peer reviewed articles section. See for yourself how smart our experts are, no login required.
Save solutions to your questions, answers you’ve discovered through searching plus helpful articles in your personal knowledgebase for easy future access.
Access the answers to your technology questions today.
30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.
Members of the expert community talk about why the experience at Experts Exchange is different than what you will find anywhere else.
Try it out and discover for yourself.
30-day free trial. Register in 60 seconds.
Join the community of experts here and help other tech pros by answering question in your area of expertise. You can earn FREE access to all Experts Exchange's premium features and resources.
humeniuk has suggest pretty good comments. I just wanna summarize as that you could use Mod_rewrite to rewrite the dynamic page to be appeared as a static page. This way, you don't have to create another function as displayProduct.
However, if you still prefer to go with the new function, it is best to make it static page. Once again, it can be done using mod_rewrite.
It's not that hard to learn and you can get help on EE to write the specific rules that you need (post in the Apache zone).
Here's a pretty good basic article about mod_rewrite:
www.devshed.com/c/a/Apache
Here are the official Apache documents:
Apache 1.3 - http://httpd.apache.org/do
Apache 2.0 - http://httpd.apache.org/do
Most hosts (but not all) allow mod_rewrite.
mod_rewrite is not related to PHP, it's an Apache module. If you're hosting on Linux/Apache, there shouldn't be a technical problem, it's just a matter of whether or not the host allows it (the best way to find out is to call them).
On the other hand, if you are hosting on Windows/IIS, you can't use mod_rewrite. You would need a third party filter, such as ISAPIrewrite, which hosts will rarely allow on shared Windows hosting.
jon, most hosts will allow you to do mod_rewrite and indeed, it is not as hard as we may first thought about (so many funny tag) but it is actually a matter of copy and pasted from the tutorials on the web. Else, you may request help from EE (suggested by humeniuk)
What i would do is first to email to 1and1 if they have mod_rewrite enabled. Second, would be to modified the web page with mod_rewrite implemented.
Business Accounts
Answer for Membership
by: humeniukPosted on 2007-02-11 at 18:36:41ID: 18512412
Dynamic pages are no problem. SE's read the html that is output by the server, not the PHP (or whatever) scripting on the server. Take a look at the source of your page when viewed in a browser. This is what the SE's will see.
If you want your product pages to be indexed, they need to be optimized like any other page. It is also critical that you your on-site navigation allows the SE's to access all of your pages. Good text-link navigation is a must. A sitemap is a good idea, too.
In most cases with dynamic sites, it is also a good idea to simplify your URL's. Something like www.domain.com/page.php?so
You are better off with something like www.domain.com/this-that.p
"I am planning on storing all meta information in the database relating to each product also."
What do you mean by meta information. Is that a reference to meta-tags? If so, you should know that meta tags have not been a ranking factor for any major search engine for many years.
My advice would be to take the time to properly review the SEO tutorial at www.seo-blog.com/tutorial.