Static pages back to dynamic after jagger?

[jaldridge]

About a month before Jagger hit I converted about 1000 dynamic pages on my site to static pages. I personally think that it was this that caused my site to drop so badly during the jagger update.

I never used any "bad" ranking techniques on the site.

The site is www.eyeonspain.com. When I do site:www.eyeonspain.com and click on "10" to go straight to that page, Google then only goes to page 6 and the "repeat the search with the omitted results included" link is displayed. As all the static pages I converted from dynamic are quite similar, I think I may have actually hurt the site by doing this.

I am now wondering whether to change them all back to static.

BTW, some supplemental pages with the old dynamic url still rank really well.

Any comments?

[adbart]

Yeah, change them back.

You've unintentionally got yourself penalised for duplicate content and so to rectify the problem, you need to change it back so that it is singular.

Go for dynamic, all of that stuff about static pages being better for SERPs is complete b*****s.

[brian.mark]

We've done the same thing in the past. All we did to correct it was add 301 redirects in our dynamic scripts to the new static location. Essentially, anything in the index gets replaced with the new content in a matter of days for small sites, weeks or months for large sites. Ours took about 6 months to sort out, but sitemaps can now fix it faster. Just list all of the old URL's and the new URL's in your sitemap.xml file and you'll see the updated structure fully in Google's index in a few days.

Brian.

[bhartzer]

I personally think that it was this that caused my site to drop so badly during the jagger update.

Most likely it wasn't. Jagger had more to do with off-site factors like links than off-site factors.

If you completely changed your site's URLs then that would explain the drop in rankings--that doesn't have much to do with the Jagger update in particular.

If you've got duplicate pages then that's definitely an issue--so do what brian.mark says and see if you can correct it with 301s. If necessary, add a Google sitemap as well.

[jaldridge]

I did 301 all the pages and submitted the sitemap. Google picked up all the new pages very quickly. It was all going to plan until Jagger hit. I think the pages are too similer and so a penalty has caused the site to lose ranking, particularly for the pages that I changed to static.

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by jaldridge

I did 301 all the pages and submitted the sitemap. Google picked up all the new pages very quickly. It was all going to plan until Jagger hit. I think the pages are too similer and so a penalty has caused the site to lose ranking, particularly for the pages that I changed to static.

If you are doing a 301 redirect from Dynamic-->Static then the fact that the pages are identical makes no difference. Many times over I simply changed the page extensions from .html-->.php and left the page content alone. The SE's took various times to make the updates in the index and rankings do fluctuate during this process, but it doesn't have anything to do with the fact that the content is similar or exactly the same.

[Arizona Web]

Originally Posted by adbart

Yeah, change them back.

Go for dynamic, all of that stuff about static pages being better for SERPs is complete b*****s.

Adbart, this statement is incorrect. All factors being equal, a static page will rank better than a dynamic one. If it was complete b*****s then the entire SEO community, and Google themselves, would not have been making this assertion for the past 6 years.

The difference is small, miniscule even, but there is a difference. No offense, but telling this guy to re-change pages back to dynamic is not good advice. If Jagger caused the problem, I doubt it had anything to do with his page names and probably had more to do with his inbound links.

[incrediblehelp]

Originally Posted by Arizona Web

All factors being equal, a static page will rank better than a dynamic one. If it was complete b*****s then the entire SEO community, and Google themselves, would not have been making this assertion for the past 6 years.

I don't agree here.

The only reason some shy away from dynamic pages is NOT because of the fact that the page itself is dynamically created. This has nothing to do with it. Rather it is because some who code these dynamic websites use WAY to many parameters in the URL strings which the search engines dislike greatly because they are difficult to crawl and index. The fact that the page itself is dynamic doesn't make a bit of difference. Ask Amazon.com if you don't believe me.

[brian.mark]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

The fact that the page itself is dynamic doesn't make a bit of difference. Ask Amazon.com if you don't believe me.

If I could just get as many links as Amazon.com has to my site... ;-)

Actually, the only problem I've had with dynamic pages ranking is generation time. If the server gets hit hard, they crawl slower on dynamic than static, making updates to the index take forever. I've gone to static for most of my stuff now.

Brian.

[incrediblehelp]

Sure download time is SEO 101. If the spider or visitor cant get to your page then what good is it?

[jaldridge]

ok, I'm still confused guys! I think the problem with my site is that all the 1000 pages are so similar. It is a directory of property development names so only the property name, and sometimes the property location, is different from page to page. I think there is an issue of duplicate content here for which I think the site would be better with dynamic pages.

I have another site which I created recently, again property names, but that one has over 2000 pages which I created as static from the very start. The interesting thing here is that even after submitting a sitemap to Google nearly 2 months ago, it still refuses to index ANY of those pages property pages. Dupliacte content issues? I think so.

I think dynamic must be the way to go when there is such little difference between pages.

[brian.mark]

If there isn't much difference on the pages, then it won't matter if it is static or dynamic. It'll be duplicate any way you slice it, regardless of technology used.

Brian.

[jaldridge]

Thanks for your help all. I've decided to change the pages back to static and see what happens! You've got to try these things....

[Arizona Web]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

I don't agree here.

The only reason some shy away from dynamic pages is NOT because of the fact that the page itself is dynamically created. This has nothing to do with it. Rather it is because some who code these dynamic websites use WAY to many parameters in the URL strings which the search engines dislike greatly because they are difficult to crawl and index. The fact that the page itself is dynamic doesn't make a bit of difference. Ask Amazon.com if you don't believe me.

True. I should have restated that last post to note the difference between clean URLs and long URLs with lots of parameters.

[Arizona Web]

Originally Posted by incrediblehelp

I don't agree here.

The only reason some shy away from dynamic pages is NOT because of the fact that the page itself is dynamically created. This has nothing to do with it. Rather it is because some who code these dynamic websites use WAY to many parameters in the URL strings which the search engines dislike greatly because they are difficult to crawl and index. The fact that the page itself is dynamic doesn't make a bit of difference. Ask Amazon.com if you don't believe me.

True. I should have written that post addressing the URLs, not the dynamic content.

Dynamic pages are great, dynamic pages with clean URLs are even better :-)

Changing something big like that can stink. Changing it back can stink even worse. Changing it back again is the ultimate in stink.

[cspelts]

Originally Posted by Arizona Web

I should have written that post addressing the URLs, not the dynamic content.

Dynamic pages are great, dynamic pages with clean URLs are even better :-)

In my experience, I've found that to be true. For me, mysite.com/local/new-york.asp has generally ranked a little higher than mysite.com/local.asp?id=new-york

So if I have a manageable number of records, and the page names won't be changing, I go the static-page-name-with-dynamic-content route. But, if it's a large database, and new records are constantly being added, I haven't noticed a huge difference with a dynamic URL.