Fun with Dynamic Websites
Jessica Chance, Search Engine Specialist
Fun with Dynamic Websites
February 28th 2006 - New York SES Conference
Jake Baliey, True Local
Laura Thieme, Bizresearch
Dynamic websites have lots of questions surrounding them.
How do I get my dynamic URL’s indexed?
Well to start, ?’s and &’s are okay. You also don’t have to rewrite your URL’s and create static pages to get indexed. It could be optimizing issues. Check your page titles, headings, and product descriptions.
Here are some things to do to fix your indexing problems.
- Add links to your homepage
- Do a Google Site Map
- Add footer links
- Add featured and related product description
- Use breadcrumbs
Most importantly remember your site will not get indexed over night.
When promoting database driven sites it is important to create roadmaps, and reconstruct database interaction within the website. An example is changing the way content is designed and edited. You can also do data feeds to help your pages show up (shopping, Google, Froogle). Yahoo Paid Inclusion is another option.
A big thing to check is your URL structure.
- URL’s should be only 3-4 variables
- Review search engine indices (In plain English, are your URL’s indexed?)
- Review current rankings
- Review spider activity (How often are the spiders hitting your site?)
- Determine appropriate target terms
- Optimize
- Monitor improvements
When rewriting your URL’s you can hide certain variables. If you are like me and have no idea what that means here is a helpful place to go: http://www.webmasterworld.com/.
Problems that may occur when restructuring URL’s: duplicate content and the infinite loop problem. If there are problems try checking the following:
- Check Robots.txt
- Check the site architecture
- Check to see if links are well formed (they should be absolute if possible)
- Check for disallowed characters in the parameters / ? : @ & = + $
- Check for control space characters à ß # % {} | \ []
These are just a few notes that might help when dealing with dynamic websites.

