Welcome to Really Simple Software  

Search Engines don't like dynamic pages

Most of the websites today are database driven or dynamic, meaning web pages are dynamically generated by php, asp, jsp or similar technologies. If you look at the URLs that we use to access these pages, you will notice that they don't end with a html extension, and usually there is a question mark in the URL followed by many name= value pairs (called query string).

for example:

http://www.somedomain.com/forum_posts.asp?TID=SEO&PN=1

the "?TID=1722&PN=1" part of the url is the query string.

Dynamic url makes it convenient for the software engine to pass information around between pages, most of the search engines don't like it. Many search engines refuse to index pages that has question mark in the url due to technical issues.

Here is google's policy on dynamically generated pages:

"We're able to index dynamically generated pages. However, because our web crawler could overwhelm and crash sites that serve dynamic content, we limit the number of dynamic pages we index."

Jon Ricerca has written a research article on how dynamic url affects ranking. The statistic shows although both Yahoo and Google do include some URLs with question marks in it, the percentage is extremely low.

This is really bad news for site owners who offer dynamic contents. What good is a site if search engines don't index it and therefore no one can find it?

Search Engine Friendly URLs

The solution is to use search engine friendly urls (url without the question mark) in all your web pages.  Instead of the dynamic one above, use some thing like:

http://www.somedomain.com/forum_posts/SEO/1/

Changing dynamic URLs to static URLs not only helps search engines, it also makes the website more user friendly. Webmasters can use meaningful names in the virtual directories to categorize pages and therefore making them more meaningful to the user. And according to the Rest Architectural Style, all web sites should be using static urls.

Making all urls look static is not a easy task on a dynamic website. The general approach is to manually change all the <a href= "..."> links in pages to make them look like static. This change is mandatory because href links are what search engines see and use to judge whether the url is dynamic or not. The next step is to on the fly rewrite the url as the request coming to the web server. Because the href links were changed, our web server won't be able to understand it when the request comes in. On Apache, we can use mod_rewrite to change the static url request back to the dynamic one so that the web server knows how to process the request.

This approach has many drawbacks. Step one is labor intensive. It is especially true when you have thousands of pages. In many cases step one is not possible or requires changing the software that produce the dynamic content.

ReallySimpleServer Advantage

RSServer SEF free edition solves this problem by automating everything. 

Webmaster will specify in the configuration file a pair of URLs, the original dynamic url which has the question mark in it and the search engine friendly url which we want to show to the search engines. Acting as a reverse proxy in front of the web server, ReallySimpleServer rewrites contents as they are streamed to the browsers and rewrites urls as they come in.

Starting from version 2.2, a new automatic feature is added. User now has two options when it comes to making search engine friendly urls.

• Free Style.
• Fixed Style.

Fxied Style is for those webmasters who don't want to spend time on writing regex rules. It is a fast and easy way to doing search engine friendly urls.

For example, this is what's in the config file:

<AutoSEF enable="true" deliminator="-">
  <rewrite pagename="forum_posts.asp" npagehead="forum_posts-asp"/>
  <rewrite pagename="forum_topics.asp" npagehead="forum_topics-asp"/>
</AutoSEF>

When RSServer sees this url in the http response: "forum_post.asp?T=12&V=24", it will convert to "forum_posts-asp-T-12-V-24.html". The result is not as meaningful as those when using the Free Style option, nevertheless, it is still static and will be indexed by search engines.

About Really Simple Software

Really Simple Software develops tools to enhance the security, performance and user experience of web servers. 

Our core technology, RSServer (short for ReallySimpleServer) is an industry strength, multi-threaded, high performance reverse proxy server which sits between the internet and our customers' web servers. By monitoring/modifying the http stream going between the internet and the back end web servers, and by integrating third party web service http streams, we are able to offer unique value add services to our customers when no one else could.

Really Simple Software's first product is a free web content rewrite engine that turns dynamic websites into search engine friendly websites. the product is used by web masters and search engine optimization professionals to boost website rankings and making websites more user friendly.

Really Simple Software is established on the belief that software programs need to be really easy to use and really simple for the user to learn. Our products are designed and built in a way that requires minimum configuration and most of the time user is able to just install the product and start using it.