Dynamic versus Static Web pages: Which are for you?

07/31/2007

David Brown

Static Web pages are simply files that contain only html code and are placed on the Web server. HTML means "Hypertext Markup Language." These files are written in plain text that can be deciphered easily by search engines. They usually have file suffixes like .htm or .html. Dynamic Web pages are generated on-the-fly, usually from a database, when a person or browser requests the link. They have file suffixes like php or asp and may have log queries attached to them. For example. this might be the URL (Universal Resource Locator, which is the Web address) of a dynamic Web page: : www.mydomain.php?ID=305312§ion=3214&CATID=IP679241 The major advantage of static Web pages is that search engines can find them easily. At one time, search engines could not find dynamic Web pages at all. Google and other search engines can now follow many dynamic search URLs. However, since the URL also determines the search engine rank of a page for a keyword, URLs of dynamic Web pages that have many numbers or text or letters that are unrelated to content will get less search engine visibility than static Web pages with meaningful file names. It is a lot easier for Google to tell what www.mydomain.com/iraq_map.htm is supposed to be about, then it is to rank www.mydomain.com/cms.php?id=35454631§ion=geog&catid=734531&reffer=3551512 Longer URLs are usually penalized in searches as well, and Dynamic URLs that are generated by databases and Content Management Systems (CMS) are generally long. Some Dynamic HTML (DHTML) pages do not exist on the Web at all in reality and are only assembled when requested. Such pages are usually impossible for search engines to find. The advantages of Dynamic Web pages are that they can often be generated automatically, by a Content Management System, and can be easily updated from a central database, so that changes in links or site structure can be easily propagated across a whole site, and portal pages and site maps can be generated automatically in an orderly way. Content Management Systems allow people who do not know anything about Web sites or HTML to create new Web pages, and are therefore very useful for commercial applications and news Web sites that must be updated quickly by people with minimal Web expertise. Some types of dynamic Web page generation systems must be avoided, because they make it virtually impossible for search engines to list the page, or produce hugely inflated page counts. These include systems that make URLs that include the session ID of the user, which is obviously going to change or referrer IDs and the like. Some CMS systems change their URL generation schemes when they are upgraded. If that happens, you can lose all your search engine listings every time you upgrade the software. An optimal compromise is to use a system that generates dynamic pages and then turns them into static html. The dynamic pages should be deleted to prevent possible penalties for duplicate content. Of course, this usually does not apply to pages that are generated on-the-fly from user search queries.