Dynamic Site Smarts
Search engines are good at indexing dynamic sites, and the advice in this book applies just as
well to ASP and PHP pages—and even pages with URLs containing a question mark—as it does
to old-school HTML. If your site is of the dynamic variety, follow some basic guidelines to avoid
common pitfalls:
Be sure that search engines can follow standard links t • o every page on your site. Don’t
expect search engines to fill out a form or run a search to drill down to your most juicy
content.
• You’re trying to appeal to humans, so use human-friendly URLs. Would you rather click
on this:
http://www.yoursite.com/church-bells/discount/
or this?
http://www.yoursite.com/prod.php?id=23485&blt=234
• Limit the number of parameters in the URL to a maximum of two.
• Be sure that your URLs function even if all dynamic parameters are removed.
• When linking internally, always link with parameters in the same order and format.
• Set up an XML Sitemap (see Chapter 10 for details) if there is any reason to think that search
engine robots aren’t seeing all of your pages.
• Use robots.txt to exclude stub pages (autogenerated pages with no real content, such as
empty directory categories and empty search results). Search engines want to index pages
containing meaningful content, not empties generated by dynamic programs.
Your dynamic site has a lot to offer. And now you know how to help it reach its full search engine
potential!
