Hi there,

We've all heard that static pages can have advantages in terms of weight in SE over dynamic ones. You can agree or not. I agree.

This being said I'm working on a project to create static pages dynamically. PHP generates pages from a database (file name, page name, title, keywords, ads etc.) The pages sit statically on the server until a PHP script updates the files whenever needed.

Is anyone familiar with that pratice? any experience?

Why would you agree with something that is so obviously complete BS??

We've all heard that static pages can have advantages in terms of weight in SE over dynamic ones.

:-D

I've been lurking for almost 10 years on the web, and it's the first time I hear such thing.
And would you, please, enlighten me on how a search engine can detect that your page is dynamic or not ?
I am really curious about that.

I don't believe the seach engine weighting either. The only reason you might want static pages over dynamic ones is reduce server load, if very many people are viewing you at the same time.

I've seen one very ugly solution, which was to have a cron job (a regular run job on unix/linux), use the lynx browser to download a dynamic page from the server and then save it as a static page on the same server. It works, its only one line of code, and somehow seems like a hideously ugly technical solution.

I dont know why everyone is being so harsh about it , he was only asking questions and thats what a forum is for ... anyway , The only reason google doesnt like dynamic pages is when many parameters are passed through the URL , the dont really like more than 2 / 3 .. e.g http://www.url.com/index.php?page=11&URL1=23&TOKEN=iudhd^%&4d54d66d7 .... hope this helps

I also think same as mate says. I also did the seo for the flash web site. I know it is difficult but than also it is on first page with high competitive keyword. So if any flash web site can come on first page than i think any dynamic site also can come on first page.

Originally Posted by DexterV

Hi there,

We've all heard that static pages can have advantages in terms of weight in SE over dynamic ones. You can agree or not. I agree.

This being said I'm working on a project to create static pages dynamically. PHP generates pages from a database (file name, page name, title, keywords, ads etc.) The pages sit statically on the server until a PHP script updates the files whenever needed.

Is anyone familiar with that pratice? any experience?

Static vs dynamically built pages (i.e. HTML/XHTML) has ZERO to do with rankings... Total BS as a previous poster said.

The whole static vs dynamic debate had nothing to do with whether the HTML is built dynamically or was static HTML. It had to do with the URLs.

Back in the olden days, eons ago all "dynamic" sites like ecommerce sites used a single index.php, for instance, to dynamically render pages. URL query string parameters would be passed on the URL to tell the then mostly home grown CMS systems which page to render... Like:

http://example.com/index.php?categor...&productid=789

It's these ugly, non-SEO friendly URLs that wreaked havoc on SEO. Search engines had problems crawling sites like these. Lots of search engines would ignore everything after the first, second, or third query string parameter (even though Google and most of the big engines seem to have managed to learn to crawl even these types of sites well today).

These types of "dynamic" URLs are what were bad for SEO, not the HTML that was rendered... and for many reasons. They lead to LOTS of duplicate content because search engines index URLs. The below URLs all render the same HTML

http://example.com/index.php?categoryid=123&subcatid=456&productid=78 9
http://example.com/index.php?categoryid=123&productid=789&subcatid=45 6
http://example.com/index.php?subcatid=456&categoryid=123&productid=78 9
http://example.com/index.php?productid=789&categoryid=123&subcatid=45 6
http://example.com/index.php?productid=789&subcatid=456&categoryid=123
http://example.com/index.php?subcatid=456&productid=789&categoryid=123

yet they are seen by the search engines as different "pages".

Thanks to you all for your answers.

Wow. I guess it was time for me to understand that everything is about URLs, not about the "physical" files and their name on the server.

So now I understand that,

index.php?categ=6&product=432
index.php?categ=6&product=336

are 2 different pages according to search engines even though there's only one index.php on the server.

My initial question should then have been, how do big sites manage all their nice keyword rich URL pages dynamically?

URL rewriting !!

I'm diving in it.

Originally Posted by DexterV

This being said I'm working on a project to create static pages dynamically. PHP generates pages from a database (file name, page name, title, keywords, ads etc.) The pages sit statically on the server until a PHP script updates the files whenever needed.

Is anyone familiar with that pratice? any experience?

You appear to be a convert now but yes I have heard of the practice. One of the lesser known directory scripts actually builds static pages from the database entries and place them on the site.

Other scripts use a caching system to save static copies of the more requested pages and reduce mysql usage.

So your question was not the source of your roasting.

I have quite clear illustration of how google treats fast serving pages. As soon as we had implemented memcache usage for DB results our response time dropped from 200ms to 30ms and thus at first weekend we got +10k people from google.

From this point of view static pages are more efficient than poorly written php scripts with badly optimized sql queries, but if you manage to make your script fast there will be no difference.

colbyt, was it my intro that irritated the well informed rather than my question?

Nevertheless, I find this legitimate usage of dynamically generated files for performance purposes quite interesting. Thanks to you and mtishetsky.

Chris was just being Chris. His bark is far worse than his bite unless you are a spammer. I am at a loss as to where tripy's comment came from.

It may have been the wording of your question. I don't know that I have ever heard that static pages score better than dynamic. In many cases they do get indexed faster, or so a great many people seem to believe.

I believe there is little long term differece if you are serving the pages fast and you are getting your title into the browser bar and the SEs; something other than article 912.html

I am at a loss as to where tripy's comment came from.

I was explaining that, in all those years spend to programming web apps, I never heard of anything like

static pages can have advantages in terms of weight in SE over dynamic ones

.
That's all