Dynamic pages and Search Engines By Clare Lawrence 10th March 2003 Clare is CEO of Discount Domains Ltd a leading UK Domain name registration service.

Do search engines such as Google penalise dynamic pages?

Dynamic pages are used to deliver content from a database to websites – advantage being that data can be updated and contents of pages changed without need to reload pages etc.

Google publishes guidance notes on its site at http://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html and at http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

These say that dynamic pages are indexed but that Googlebot ( Google’s spider ) can overwhelm dynamic sites and therefore amount of pages indexed are limited

Google recommends:- “If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e. URL contains a ‘?’ character) be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep parameters short and number of them small.

How to get dynamic pages indexed

The home page content needs to be "catchy". You've got approximately 5 seconds to draw visitor's attention to content of site. When I enter site, there has to be an incentive for me to stay.

Your home page should tell story, preferrably in headline and first paragraph. The rest of your web page should provide detail. As I said, you have a matter of seconds to grab your visitor's attention. Do not blow it with a weak opening.

A good home page answers all of "W" questions:

- who (is site for), - what (do you offer), - where (your geographic area), - when (if it is time-related, ie. an event), - and why (why choose your services),

providing visitor with useful information about your organization, product, service or event. If you look at your home page and it does not make you want to stay on site, you need to rewrite and redesign it.

Another letter? "C" for example... because a home page should be