Webmaster Articles > Dynamic Pages
Find out if dynamic pages get penalized by search engines.
Do search engines such as Google penalize dynamic pages?
Dynamic pages are used to deliver content from a database to websites – the advantage being that data can be updated and the contents of pages changed without the need to reload pages etc.
Google publishes guidance notes on its site at http://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html and at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
These say that dynamic pages are indexed but that the Googlebot spider can overwhelm dynamic sites and therefore the amount of pages indexed are limited.
Google recommends that 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 small.
How to get dynamic pages indexed
There are ways to get dynamic pages indexed. If the site is relatively small then create a site map, which has static links to each of the dynamic pages. This gives the search engines a “doorway” to the dynamic pages.
For larger sites there are a number of ways to change the syntax of a dynamic URL so that it appears to be static. i.e http://www.discountdomainsuk.com/glossary.phplang=english&gid=28 can be re-written as http://www.discountdomainsuk.com/glossary/english/28.
If your index page is dynamically generated then it will be particularly difficult for search engines to index your site. If possible, you should avoid dynamically generated index pages.
Algorithms
The search engines, Google in particular, are getting better at indexing dynamic pages.
Conclusion
Dynamic pages are very useful to deliver content particularly if you wish to use a content management system. The Search engines do have some difficulties with dynamic content, but there are ways to improve the chances of dynamic pages being indexed.
Clare Lawrence is CEO of Discount Domains Ltd – A leading UK provider
of Domain name registration.
