What is SEO friendly?

I see very often people mentioning that their directory is SEO friendly but what is SEO friendly?

It seems most imply that dynamic directories are not SEO friendly and some how search engines can not spider it while static directories are SEO friendly because it can be spidered by search engines.

AS far as I know this is totally FALSE and search engines (any important one) can spider dynamic pages. is SEO friendly directory just a urban myth from the past?

 

Some directories intentionally make it so search engines cannot follow links to listed sites or the links are done in such a way that PageRank is not sent out with your link.

 

stymiee,

do you have an example of one?

 

Why anybody would want to do that? Is someone trying hard, not to get visitors from search engines?

 

its the outoing links from those directories that are not SEO-friendly. the directory pages themselves are

 

IIRC zeal.com is not search engine friendly. I'm sure there are others but I've never cared that much about it since every link is a good link.

 

SE friendly directories show URLs to subtopics with keywords

example
a hotel in angeles city philippines ..
in a SE friendly directory the URL may consist of all catregories and sub categories such as

world/asia/philippines/luzon/angeles_city/hotels/name_of_hotel.htm

which would give THAT entry far more weight for a searcher looking for hotels in the philippines on luzon island
or hotels in angeles city, pilippines, ...
as the keyword is contained in the URL it - the URL adds to relevancy for many additional search queries
NON-SE friendly directories may just show a number of file for that entry like
result:name_of_hotel.htm

 

1) links are static (not redirect)
2) URL of directory pages are static (no parameters)
3) no more than 50 links on one page

Many directories cam themseves SEO-friendly. Most of them aren't 100% SEO-friendly

 

Why does it matter if it is static or dynamic?

 

Some search engines can't follow redirects and it also makes it possible to block the directory where the redirect script resides via robots.txt making it unreachable by search engine spiders.

 

4) Blocks redirect scripts
5) Uses URLs that can't be indexed (sessionIDs, etc..)
6) Uses rel="nofollow"

 

static pages are indexed and assigned PR faster.

 

Do you have anything to back that statement up?

 

Google Facts & Fiction

Google and Dynamic Pages
http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/guidelines.html

 

It's from the observations on a couple of my sites and other sites.


.asp, .php are as good as .html so long as they don't use parameters.

 

Redirect links don't pass link popularity and page rank to the site it's linking out to.

 

Lets not confuse this with the fact dynamic pages with few paramaters get crawled often by Google and rank well. (even if they dont visually show PR)

 

The only parameters that affect search engine bots from crawling and indexing dynamic pages are sessionIDs and, as pointed out above, id=. It's also likely that query strings with odd characters might cause problems, too, but other then that dynamic pages with query strings shouldn't be an issue.

 

the point is static pages get crawled faster than dynamic pages for the same link strength. A strong site with a few parameters can get crawled daily. A weak site using static pages may get crawled monthly. Most directoryies aren't strong. That makes static page one of SEO-friendly things.

Dynamic or static pages won't affect how they're ranked. Pages with parameters could gain PR but it's very slow.

 

That doesn't make any sense. I don't see how you can conclude static pages are more SEO friendly from what you stated. If anything, you clearly stated that higher PR pages are crawled more frequently the low PR pages (that part is true) and that's about it. Dynamic pages are no different from static pages to search engines in most cases with the obvious exceptions being certain items in the query string make cause issues like sessionIDs and id=.

PR is only a numerical representation of a page's link popularity. Generally speaking, a dynamic page with more inbound links is going to have a higher PR then a static page with less inbound links. And that PR will exist as soon as that inbound link is counted and PR is calculated again. There's certainly no delay just because it is a dynamic page. Plus dynamic pages can be made to look static using mod_rewrite so that just blurs the lines even more.