database driven vs static pages

[Rookie]

Can someone post some good articles on optimizing your site for search engines that relates to database driven sites.

I have found some but nothing that really helps me improve my ranking (appearance in google/yahoo/etc... results)

Thanks

[Jmeeks]

Can you provide more details as to what you've done so far? Just want to make sure we don't recommend something that's already been tried/done.

John

DiscountASP.NET
DiscountASP.NET (http://www.discountasp.net)

[Rookie]

That's my problem, I haven't been able to find much help so I haven't done anything. I was just trying to get a point in the right direction. I understand that the search engines search meta-data on pages, images, etc... But I don't really understand how or if they search db text.

Does that help?

[Eric]

Check out searchenginewatch.com

They have many articles on Search Engine Marketing

Eric
DiscountASP.NET
http://www.DiscountASP.NET

[Jmeeks]

I agree with Eric, SearchEngineWatch is an excellent place to start as well as WebMasterWorld. A database is a tricky thing to try and optimize for so I would start there only because these two sites tend to focus on optimizing for search engines.

John

DiscountASP.NET (http://www.discountasp.net)

[mjp]

I have read that variables in URLs are not indexed with the same weight as URLs without variables. But I did not see a difference when I changed a site to use a non-variable format. In other words -


site.com/index.php?article=104


ranked the same as:


site.com/index.php/104


Your mileage may vary, but I didn't see an effect.

mjp
DiscountASP.NET
<SUB><SUP>http://DiscountASP.NET (http://DiscountASP.NET)

[vvsharma]

Google in specific would prefer something like 'domain.com/topic/databases or domain.com/topic=databases' rather than 'domain.com/topicId=2 or something similar'.And offcourse,its always the case that public forums have content w/ the most common keywords either in thier posts(like exact error msges) or as categories.Also I believe one of the important factors would be, how often the content changes/gets updated which is another reason why forums get into thier search results.
There are several other factors such as the sitemap,domain name etc...

Vikram

DiscountASP.NET
www.DiscountASP.NET (http://www.discountasp.net/)

Post Edited (vvsharma) : 12/15/2006 1:06:19 AM GMT

[wisemx]

With Microsoft dynamic Web languages forum pages are found by bots once the result exists.
Take for example popular ASP forums like Snitz, the ASP page code is all server-side.
Some of the content will be pulled from the Database server.
At that point the resulting pages are no longer dynamic unless they contain dynamic media.

When a bot climbs through forum code it relies on the same things available to the browser.
Meta tags and search terms/phrases can all be added dynamically but it will be static content the bot snags.
Granted unless you specify certain restrictions in your robots.txt file Google will find more than your users can.

[Rookie]

Thank you all for your answers. I see this is going to be a tough task but some has to do it http://community.discountasp.net/emoticons/scool.gif

[Rookie]

How do websites like forums get into search engine results? I would assume that most if not all of there content is database driven.

[mjp]

There are also some forums that keep a mirror of the active site in static pages. For example, this:

http://bukowski.net/forum/archive/index.php/f-5.html

Is the same information as this:

http://bukowski.net/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=5

But thefirst link is to the "archive" version, which is all flat HTML versions of the threads and posts, and presumably more search engine friendly.

I'm not sure how many ASP forums use that method (that example is a php/MySQL forum), but it is becoming more common.







mjp
DiscountASP.NET
<SUB><SUP>http://DiscountASP.NET (http://DiscountASP.NET)

[Rookie]

Not a bad idea, I hadn't thought of that. I have been doing some research on google's search engine have actually greatly increased my sites ranking in the results just be submitting a xml sitemap that includes all the pages and all the possible variables in the url (ex: bands.aspx?bandID=1, 2, 3 etc...). It really helped out.

[joelnet]

Rookie said...
Not a bad idea, I hadn't thought of that. I have been doing some research on google's search engine have actually greatly increased my sites ranking in the results just be submitting a xml sitemap that includes all the pages and all the possible variables in the url (ex: bands.aspx?bandID=1, 2, 3 etc...). It really helped out.do you have a link to the info on how to create this sitemap xml?


Joel Thoms
DiscountASP.NET
http://www.DiscountASP.NET

[bruceb]

I don't know if this is still relevant but search for sitemap.xml (http://search.live.com/results.aspx?q=sitemap.xml) and you should find some tools.