Dynamic VS static content

[JimmiJames]

I wondering if there's any drawbacks of having all your content in a database when spiders crawl your site.

[Grokodile]

Most of the sites I build are PHP/MySQL based, so all of the real content is dynamic.

However, because PHP is on the server side, there is no need for the search engine spider to know how the data is organized. Titles, meta tags, headings, descriptive text and content can all be figured out and set based on your needs.

In otherwords, the database just appears to be a set of pages, as long as you ensure that some type of easy to discover navigation path is available.

[incrediblehelp]

No problems at all JimmiJames.

[mcspec]

Couldnt agree more. Php and mysql is the way to go. Remember though when creating google sitemaps and other to give SE's real paths to the page not the dynamic link or it wont find the page as easily.

[flood6]

Originally Posted by mcspec

Remember though when creating google sitemaps and other to give SE's real paths to the page not the dynamic link or it wont find the page as easily.

I just wanted to point out that it can be bad for your SERPs if you can use more than 1 URL to get to the same page.

[JimmiJames]

Originally Posted by mcspec

Couldnt agree more. Php and mysql is the way to go. Remember though when creating google sitemaps and other to give SE's real paths to the page not the dynamic link or it wont find the page as easily.

Real path, now i'm confused? Since all my content is in a database, my pages don't actually exist until a user clicks on a link.

[incrediblehelp]

I am not sure mcspec meant, but the bottomline is you can simlpy send Google a list of you page URLs dynamic or not for your sitemap to work.

[mikesmith76]

Real path, now i'm confused? Since all my content is in a database, my pages don't actually exist until a user clicks on a link.

When using dynamic links with parameters the url can quickly become long and messy. Using mod_rewrite (or equivalent) you can make the url's look "static like".

For example if you had the following

news.php?year=2006&page=2&newsid=2365

yoou could create the following static like url

news/2006/2/2365.html

and use mod_rewrite to silently rewrite the second url into the first.

More information here