Dynamic Content

"Dynamic" sounds good, but dynamic content is bad for you. Search engine spiders are looking for content that tells what your page is about. But what if the page changes all the time? Today the page is about Widgets, so the search engine spends a lot of effort classifying it in the list of pages it retrieves for the keyword widget. Tomorrow it might be about phasars. Not worth indexing at all, is it? This sort of content is called "Dynamic Content." To help identify such content, search engines may use clues that tell them the page is generated automatically such as "?" "php" or "=" in the URL. Search Engines now know how to craw such pages and read them, but they might be leery of giving them a high ranking. Content Management Systems and Forums often use such URLs. Another way that search engines spot dynamic content is through tags in the code that tell the engine to recrawl the page very frequently or through similar flags associated with the XML site map.

For the same reason, there might be a trade off between frequent updates of a Web page, which sometimes increase the number of visitors to that page, and the ranking of that page for a particular keyword. Pages that stay the same over a long period seem to tend to have a higher ranking for their keyword.

All materials are copyright 2008 by Ami Isseroff. All rights reserved. These pages may not be reproduced in any form in electronic or printed media without express written permission from the author.

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