Can I use dynamic sites?

Nowadays, the opinion is that Google can spider dynamic URLs containing a maximum of two parameters. Three parameters are too many. Also, Session ID's are a no-go for spiders. Search engines Index the URL until the session ID and no further because otherwise they can get trapped.

Clean Up Your URLs

The problem with most e-commerce sites today is that their product pages are dynamically generated. While Google will Crawl any URL that a browser can read, most of the other search engines balk at links with "?" and "&" characters that separate CGI variables (such as "yourdomain.com/store?sku=123&uid=456").

As a result, many individual product pages don't show up outside of Google. One way to circumvent this difficulty is to create static versions of your site's dynamic pages for search engines to crawl. Unfortunately, duplicating your pages is a huge amount of extra work and a constant maintenance chore, plus the resulting pages are never quite up-to-date — all the headaches dynamic pages were designed to eliminate. A far better strategy is to follow the lead of Amazon and rewrite your dynamic URLs in a syntax that search engines will gladly crawl.

URLs that look like this:

amazon.com/store?shop=cd&sku= B00004WFIZ&ref=p_ir_m&sessionID= 107-6571839-6268523

become:

amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ref= B00004WFIZ/ref=pd_ir_m/107-6571839-6268523

Amazon's application Server knows the fields in the URL are actually CGI parameters in a certain order, and processes them accordingly. There are Apache rewrite rules that tell Apache how to translate slash-separated URLs into a format used by their application server.

On the back end, the server is passed something like this:

yoursite.com/CGI-BIN/CssP.exe?CsspApp= yoursiteClient1&CssServer=localhost%3A32401&CsspFn =@/details/ArtistDetail.HTML:@:getForm&ObjectLocation =ART&ArtistID=3918

However, users and search engines see the tidier, Apache-served URLs, which look something like this:

yoursite.com/artists/profiles/3918.html

Not only are the rewritten URLs crawlable by all search engines, they're also more human-friendly, making them easier to pass around the Internet.

With Pay-for-Inclusion programs like Overture’s, you can pay to have specific URLs indexed in Yahoo, Alta Vista, and FAST. That goes for dynamic URLs as well! The only requirement to have your dynamic web site indexed through these programs is that you can Link directly to the web pages you want indexed. This is very simple to test. Copy the URL of the page you want indexed and paste it back into a new browser window. If the right page loads, you should be all set.

For further information on how to index your dynamic web site, hire an experienced Search engine optimization expert with expertise in these areas. Most often, it takes a closer examination of your web site to determine the best strategy.