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Static website urls vs Dynamic website urls

 
    The Problem:
Dynamic websites are websites that use databases in order to insert content into a webpage by using a dynamic script like Javascript or PHP. The method of automatic webpage creation is becoming extremely popular in the industry. A lot of web masters are choosing to use dynamic websites as appose to static websites because updating and writing each static webpage by hand is a huge task and is very time consuming.

Dynamic URL is a url that is made automatically driven by a database or is run by a script. Static URLs are static meaning that in order to be changed
someone needs to open the code and change it manually there is no easy way or automatic way for this to be done. Dynamic urls are mainly
templates which are changed automatically to form new pages with different content. The content or information will be changed on the database
and it will reflect the changes automatically on the webpage. If you would want to make the same change on a static webpage you would need to
open up the page in a web page editing program and change the content manually.
Although you may be thinking that Dynamic urls are the way to go due to the ease of use there is a risk due to the fact that search engines
do not like them. People who usually end up using Dynamic websites are e-commerce stores, forums and other sites that need to update content frequently. If you are using a content management system like Wordpress or Mambo or any other system that uses a database your url will
probably look something like this:

http://www.howtobringtraffic.com/forums/thread.php?threadid=12345&sort=date

A static url is one that has no variables or numbers in it like this:

http://www.howtobringtraffic.com/dynamicvsstatic.htm

In almost all situations static pages seem to rank much better in search engine rankings and they are crawled and indexed a lot easier than dynamic URLs. Static URLs also look better to the user and are understood a lot easier than dynamic urls. A lot of times dynamic urls just done make sense. Search engines choose to only list unique pages and they decide to battle this by cutting urls after a certain number of variables e.g (> & =)

A search engine wants to only list pages its index that are unique. Search engines decide to combat this issue by cutting off the URLs after a specific number of variable strings (e.g.: ? & =).

Look at the three URLs below:

http://www.howtobringtraffic.com/forums/thread.php?threadid=12345&sort=date
http://www.howtobringtraffic.com/forums/thread.php?threadid=67890&sort=date
http://www.howtobringtraffic.com/forums/thread.php?threadid=13579&sort=date

The URLs are pointing to three separate pages but because the search engine will purge the information after the unwanted variable strings all
the three pages will look the same to the search engine therefore not all pages will be indexed.

http://www.howtobringtraffic.com/articles.html
http://www.howtobringtraffic.com/glossary.html
http://www.howtobringtraffic.com/tools.html


Now these URL's because they are viewed as all unique to the search engine they will all be indexed.

The other problem is that dynamic urls do not usually have keywords in the URLs and this is something that is very important for achieving good rankings. Your urls need to be keyword rich this has become very evident by doing research of the top performing websites in high rankings. Websites that appear in the top listings usually have urls that include keywords.

The research was done by taking over one hundred of the worlds most competitive queries such as travel, cars, and computers & comparing the factors which were involved in the top twenty results. The stats show that the top twenty results, Google had 40-50% of keywords in the URL. Yahoo showed 60% and MSN an amazing 85% What this means is that the above search engines like to see the keywords in the URLs itself. The domain name and URL string could make the difference of being in the top ten results or very far down in the bottom of the results.

Bottom line if you do not need to use Dynamic URLs in your website than do not if you do need to use them than take advantage of the Apache Mod Rewrite Rule. Please note this if for Linux servers only.

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