Can a database driven web site be indexed by the search engines? If, as I believe the answer is yes, then if using different Metatags on the different pages in held in the database will the Metatags be picked up? I want to change the Title, Description and Keywords to be specific for each individual page in the hope that Google will index the pages faster, more frequently etc etc And the Title, Description will be more relevant to the particular page. Will this work?? Currently each page has exactly the same Title, Description, Keywords. I dont want to fall foul to any of the Google rules or be penalised for spamming or anything!
Yeah that will work. All my sites are DB driven and have individual Title, Description and Keywords. Even individual, optimized URLs. Just whack it all in the database and pull it out before you spit out HTML.
This seems to be a point of confusion for a lot of people new to data driven websites. The pages that are produced by a datadriven website appear no different than those produced by hand in a package such as dreamweaver or note pad - they are both html documents when they arrive at the visitors browser / se spider. The file extensions like .php and .asp just mean that the server has to do something to those files before they are sent to out over the internet. And that's they key thing here 'before they are sent out' - the end page that the user gets is in html they can tell no difference in the make up of the document.
Just in need of clarification on 1 thing if I can? You say the end page that is seen is html. When I view a page on my site the URL shows .asp am I missing something or should I not worry?
Also, if you can, try to make your pages search engine friendly, that is without a lot of query parameters like www.mysite.com/mypage.asp?id=53&set=10