Dynamic Characters and Frames Pages - Any work arounds?

[Oman]

My site uses both frames pages and dynamic characters. dmoz and google don't seem to have a problem indexing my pages but MSN won't touch me. Therefore my site isn't even listed in MSN.

Any suggestions for work-arounds?

Oman
Myfootshop.com

[cbp]

A site map helps with all search engines.

From what I understand, all search engine spiders have trouble with dyanmic URL's, but the Googlebot is better (but not perfect) at crawling them.

Google guidelines say this (I know you asked re MSN):
"We are able to index dynamically generated pages. However, because our web crawler can easily overwhelm and crash sites serving dynamic content, we limit the amount of dynamic pages we index"

"If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a '?' character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them small. "

CBP

[achronister]

The best thing: get rid of both and redisign.

1. Frames - SE's have trouble with frames sometimes because when they crawl the site, all they see is

<frameset cols="100%,*">
<frame name="default" src="default.asp" target="_self">
<frame target="_self" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="auto">
<framespacing="0" border="0" rows="*" frameborder="0">

If they can land on another frame page, they will index it. The biggest problem I faced (used to have a frame site) is when you do get listed, it might just lead to one frame, leaving off the other two and then the user has no way to navigate anywhere else. Makes them leave pretty quick.

2. Dynamic URL's can be worked around fairly easily. The spiders can crawl 1 variable past the ? and sometimes 2 variables past. Any more than that and you're asking for trouble. If you can't cut them down to that, there is a software solution that works wonders (basically takes out the stop characters on a SSI). It can be found here http://www.xde.net/products/product_xqasp.htm

Hope that sheds some light!

Aaron

[Oman]

Aaron,

Thanks. Interesting link to exceptional digital products. Very interesting.

Oman
Myfootshop.com

[Oman]

XQASP worked quite well for us by re-writing pages with dynamic characters so that they can be read by search bots.

But back to the topic of frames pages; if we leave a frames structure, any suggestions on how to re-write the site? We currently use ASP. Is there a new and 'most accepted' method of writing pages for a site that uses dynamically generated pages?

Jeff