Almost all successful e-commerce on the internet today are dynamic in nature, they allow webmasters and users to add items, new pages, write opinions and make changes to the site dynamically. What this does to in essence is make SEO of a dynamic pages a specialised task, sometimes spanning months.
Why do search engines fail to index dynamic pages?
The first thing to mention here is that not all dynamic pages on the internet are not indexed. A majority of the search engines today have woken up to the reality of indexing dynamic pages, the reason is simple successful e-commerce sites are almost always dynamically driven. The major reason for dynamic pages failing to be indexed is the fact that there are just too many parameters being passed to the server.
Take for example a web page like www.xyz.com/name=xyz?age=27?height=5feet4?address=asdf|asd|?. A web page which is accessible with a similar web address as above, may or may not be indexed by Google or other search engines. The initial problem is that special characters like ?,*&% (no puns intended here) are not easily indexed, in addition search engine have been designed to ignore dynamic pages with such deep access.
Solutions and Workarounds
It is highly improbable that the website developers will redesign the site’s database and coding to make it search engine friendly. Unless the developers of the website have catered to a SEO friendly approach, it requires a SEO expert to manage dynamically generated pages. Below are a few popular approaches to make dynamic pages more user friendly
a) MOD rewrite
Considered the holy grail of SEO, a mod rewrite is a specialised SEO task and involves making pages SEO pages user friendly by telling the server to hide server requests and display them in a simpler more SEO friendly way.
b) Reducing Special characters
Another specialized task that requires the SEO experts and the web developers to work together. There are specialized software available that also make this task easier by automatically converting special characters to more SEO friendly characters.
c)Additional methods
There are a host of other methods that are being used by SEO experts to get dynamic pages indexed. The problem with these methods is that they are not always ‘White hat’ and may sometimes result in black listing of the entire site or web page.
Effectively the most important thing to remember when dealing with dynamic pages is, if you are not an expert tread carefully or better still get professional advice.