Can a dynamic site rank as high as a static site?

[aardvark11]

I have an existing static site that has pretty good positioning in some of the engines. We have been wanting to switch to a dynamic site for a while because of the additional features available and the ease of use.

I have read here and elsewhere that dynamic sites will get listed by Google and Yahoo but my question is - Will they get listed as high as a static site can?

It seems to me that the static site would win out because you can create it to be friendly to the SEs.

There are some "search engine friendly" shopping catalogs that create static html pages but the ones I have reviewed only put in title and metatags and the pages do not appear to be very optimized.

Does anyone have any feedback on any of the search engine friendly shopcarts? Any recommendations?

Our site is www.aardvarkforms.com. Any help, info or suggestions are appreciated.

[minstrel]

The answer to your question is "yes". You can make dynamic sites SE friendly too -- ensure that the site doesn't use session IDs or multiple variables in the URLs.

[aardvark11]

Thanks for the input Minstrel. I appreciate it.

[Phiber]

If you do have a dynamic site with multiple variables (IME Google care about that) and without session IDs, you can always use mod_rewrite.

[Cristal]

I have actually noticed a drop in ranking since switching to a dynamic system. While know we carry at least 10 times the amount of valuable information, some of the catagories that used to be strong in search engines, are almost gone. The title and meta tags were left unchanged (i know everyone says they dont use those anymore, but i like to play it safe).

We are using Cold Fusion, I don't know if that has anything to do with it. I would like to hear more on how the spiders crawl dynamic sites, is it the same as static sites, where they follow everylink?

[Phiber]

If the link is not too long - if you don't have a lot of variables and session ids in the link, you should be ok for the search engines.

[minstrel]

Spiders will attempt to follow links on ANY site, html, php, asp, cfs (is that the extension for coldfusion?), whatever...

What will mess them up are session ID's and long variable lists appended to the basic url.

Dynamic pages often have URLs that look like this:

http://www.webproworld.com/posting.php?mode=reply&t=26547

Bots can manage some of those appended variables (i.e., the ones after that "?" in the URL) but only to a certain point - and session IDs and cookies will stop most of them so you need to have a way of allowing bots access without them on your site.