Q and A: What is the best way to optimize a large dynamic site?

Dear Kalena...

If I have a site that has some dynamic pages ( say some 100 pages), and I want few of these pages (say some 10 pages) to optimise seperately for organic listing.

The solutions possible are:

1. I can create 10 html pages seperately, but it will cause content duplication problem.

2. I can create 10 static pages and run a script in the body of the static page to call the respective dynamic page. This will not create duplicate content problem, but URL redirection is done here. Redirection is frowned. So I dont want to go with this option also.

3. I can change the dynamic URL to look like a static URL. This option is acceptable.

Is there any other way to solve this problem?

Can you please help me to get clarified with my doubts, Please.

Awaiting for your reply.

Sudha

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Sudha

The optimum solution is 3), to make the dynamic page URLs more spider-friendly. Some useful links to help you with this are:

- Workaround for ASP
- Workaround for Apache
- Workaround for IIS

But you can also do 1) and simply block search engines from indexing the dynamic page duplicates by adding them to your Robots.txt file or adding a "no index, no follow" robots tag to the HTML code on those pages. I would definitely stay away from 2) as it might throw up some red flags.

But in terms of dynamic pages, search engines have become better at indexing dynamically generated content. Google doesn't index sites containing session id's but can now handle indexing sites with a large number of dynamic pages, provided they are included in an XML sitemap submitted to Google sitemaps. See this post for more info.

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