Hi there,



I wonder if someome can help, please?

If I create an ASP application that reads a database, and makes the records available to users from links, will a search engine index each database record entry as a separate html page? I was thinking of creating separate html files for each entry so as to ensure each is indexed.

C.x

You have to walk that fine line between SEO and management, what you are proposing could quickly become a management nightmare.

If I have a database that has, say, 100 items that means that I have 100 pages to maintain, 1 for each record. Where as if i create an ASP script that dynamcially generates the content of said 100 items, I could potentially only have to maintain 1 page.

To answer your question though, if those files exist, they will be indexed.

"The one language all programmers understand is profanity."

Thanks!



And presumably, a search engine won't favour one method over the other? i.e. that you create 100 pages or you have 1 template which accesses 100 records? All 100 records will be indexed to the same strength?



That's very kind of you to help.

C.x

I *think* in the second example (e.g., a dynamic page) the spider is only going to read your meta data and any actual content that is on the page. Since the content is generated dynamically, there is only ever data there at runtime and not anything worthwhile for a spider to crawl.

If you were to create a page for each record then that information would be crawled by the spider. So, as far as content goes and indexing, the HTML pages have an advantage in that there is all the relative information there for the spider to crawl.

Different engines index differently so I would also suggest checking out how each spider works.

"The one language all programmers understand is profanity."

That's exactly the issue that I'm trying to pin down.



hmmm...

at least now, I know I'm not asking a silly question.

I'll go have a look around, but advice from anyone else would be most welcome!



Using PHP I am lead to believe that individual pages do NOT need to be created, and that the contents of each page will be indexed and spidered, and so I am assuming that ASP is the same -- but I'd like to know for sure, and know whether one way is better than the other.



Curves.x

Check out www.sitepoint.com they had a great article on SEO a few weeks back.

"The one language all programmers understand is profanity."

And another recent SEO article, written by Wrox author Patrick Santry:

http://www.wwwcoder.com/main/parenti...8/default.aspx

Jim Minatel
Senior Acquisitions Editor
Wiley Technology Publishing
WROX Press
Blog: http://wroxblog.typepad.com/
Jim's Book of the week: No book this week - Donate to the Red Cross!

Thanks!

This looks really useful.

Although, it still looks a little like the 'safest' way to feed search engines is to store each page as html.

Curves.x

Ref the link posted by jminatel, I shared that and someone just kindly emailed me and told me it's incorrect:

"This discussions and the frenzy of "Search Engine Friendly" URIs is 90% Bull. They are only "friendly" if you are replacing URIs with more than 3 parameters and then you had better make sure that your server is not overwhelmed by SE bots running at full tilt. On one site where I changed over to static looking URIs, the msnbot crawl rate went from 3 to 5 mins delay between each visit to hitting pages every 2 to 3 seconds."

What do others think? Sorry to persist with this question, but it's really very useful to pin down.



C.x

IME it depends what SE(s) you are targeting. They all have very different criteria, most share some commonalities however stil often rank them differenlty.

I target Google and Google only myself. There is some great information buried about five links deep from thier main page. Thay go into great detail about useful things such as the length of meta data allowed (much more than most think), the page rank (link tool) and lots of other very useful info.

SEO, is a job in its self...

Wind is your friend
Matt