Just had a long and interesting conversation with a friend of mine who does NICHE SEO, and he gave me some intersting things to think about. One of them was old fashion HTML and XHMTL, physical pages, have an advantage over Dynamic Pages like asp, php and .net. I told him BULL#$@! The SE's all have ways of following links to dymanic pages, as long as an actual link exists. The bots can't put in the query parameters on a website, but they can certainly follow a link to a query string url. However, he said that an actual, old fashioned physical htm or html file will fair better in being crawled, because they are not dependent on database behaviour to always be there. They just....are. They physically sit in a directory, as apposed to be created dynamically when a query string shoots off a request for the dynamic engine of your choice to render a page. Ok, I gave it some thought, and I'd like to try an experiment. I want to try to create a directory site, but in this case, REALLY AND TRULY human edited. It would be a BIIIITTTTCCHHHHH to maintain, but if this dude's contention is true, should have a SEO advantage over a dynamic application. So. Before I even consider going forward, what do you guys think? Is it worth it to do it ALL BY HAND?
I think the difficulty to maintain it will overweight any possible avantages. If you make your site small enough, all right, but what about a real big site ? 50.000 pages in old fashioned HTML... have fun If you care about "dynamique failure" (which is the only drawback compares to static) I think you better to rely upon a good host, good database, and good coding, the whole working smoothly
I think at one time this was true , I have been doing heavy seo for 2 years , I used to eat , sleep STATIC pages, no one could tell me different , Until one day I said , well let me create a dynamic site , and BAM there is was same results and a hell of alot faster building sites, I used to have every thing in static tables and so on making life hell , now I would never use a static page again........ Hope this helps
I wouldn't waste my time, dynamic gets a bad rep because it can be used for large spammy sites but it gets indexed and ranks just as well as html pages so I would skip the experiment. A dynamic site built from a database with half a dozen strong links can rank very well and get fully indexed, I did it last month and it outperforms static pages below it in the serps.
If you use a good editor like dreamweaver then you should not have a problem. I have a directory with over a 1,000 pages that I built using static html and in my opioion it is better, everytime I add a new page or more they are picked up very quickly. And it always helps to make sure that you validate all of your pages as well, this will help with faster indexing as well as the serps.
Dynamic pages with lots of parameters in the url - for example index.php?item=3&page=5¶graph=75&bla=79 - tend to NOT be included by search engines because they could be dinamically generated from a database. That's just my belief based from some sites I've read, not something I have thorougly researched. When I've started my sites, I've decided that it's not worth spending time to test this and used programmed my site so that all the parameters are inserted in the url. This can be easily accomplished by using mod_rewrite, a module for Apache. You don't have to generate physical html files on your server. For example, on my game related site (in the signature) : /pc/game.php?id=100 is replaced with /pc/<game title>-game100.html /pc/cheat.php?cheatid=125&page=2 is replaced with /pc/<game title>-cheats-125-page2.html where game title is the name of the game, from which all characters not allowed in an URL are removed, spaces and word delimitors are replaced by dots. example: http://www.tgdb.net/pc/Half.Life-solution-6684-page2.html is identical to hxxp://www.tgdb.net/pc/solution.php?item=6684&page=2 (not link to prevent crawlers from crawling and detecting duplicate content)
Apart from anything else, there are two many variables that you cannot make constant to isolate the results of changing the one, html v dynamic. I like html but in practice there appears little difference in SERPS perfomance now. I would certainly say this though, dynamic will never do better than static. Steve