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02.25.09 Correcting The Dynamic Page Issues For Better Visibility  By Stoney deGeyterYears ago dynamic websites posed significant problems for search engines. While the engines have come a long way since the early days of dynamic website development, there are still some key problems that arise. Google has gone public stating that you don't need to fix your dynamic site problems, but in reality that's poor advice for the website owner. Google says this in their own self interests so they can use your problems to fix theirs. But when engaging in the battle of online visibility, you don't want to sit around while Google figures out how to plug the holes with their indexing spiders. You need to be proactive and fix the issues so you can be competitive today, not tomorrow. Poor categorization that creates duplicate pages One of the key problems with websites that serve dynamic content is producing "pages" with the same content using different URLs. This happens when there are multiple ways to navigate to specific products. For example, blogs often allow you to find articles by category, date and author. Navigating by any of these methods can get you to the same page of content but on a different URL (site.com/author/article, site.com/date/article, or site.com/category/article.) Be best solution for this is to give each product a static URL or create a "master" category that is the one in which the URL is formed. So any product you have that can fit into multiple categories, only allow one possible URL. All other links to that page or product, regardless of which category you navigate through, will link to the same URL. Secure / Non-Secure Page Duplication When dealing with ecommerce websites visitors often find themselves moving into the secure portion of the website once they enter into "checkout" mode. This security is essential to keep your information private, but what often happens is that site's will link out from their secure areas back to their products or other main pages. If the links were created wrong, the visitor will be stay in the secure portion of the site even though they are viewing pages that are also available in the unsecure area.
There is nothing inherently wrong with navigating a site completely in secure mode. But what happens is that both secure and non-secure version of the same pages can exist in the search engine indexes. This creates duplicate content issues that throw a wrench into your SEO efforts. Ensuring that when navigating out of the intended secure area visitors do not enter an unintended secure area ensures that these duplicate pages cannot exist. Session IDs Session IDs are often used for tracking visitors as they navigate from page to page and ensuring that the products they add to the shopping cart remain "attached" to that specific user. Problems arise because these session IDs are attached to the end of each URL. So instead of site.com/page.html you'll see site.com/page.html?ID=1234567890. And then the next user comes in and they get a new session ID which means the URL they are given is em>site.com/page.html?ID=2345678901. And the next woman gets em>site.com/page.html?ID=3456789012. Three users, three urls, same page. Continue reading this article. About the Author: Stoney deGeyter is president of Pole Position Marketing (www.PolePositionMarketing.com), a search engine optimization / marketing firm providing SEO and website marketing services since 1998. Stoney is also a part-time instructor at Truckee Meadows Community College, as well as a moderator in the Small Business Ideas Forum. He is the author of his E-Marketing Performance eBook and contributes daily to the E-Marketing Performance (www.eMarketingPerformance.com) marketing blog. |
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