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Dynamic URLs

A Content Management Systems is usually implemented as a collection of scripts. These retrieve data based on some parameters passed as part of the Uniform Resource Locator (URL). As an example the following link could be on the homepage of a website. It calls the 'content' script located in the home directory of the website: www.mydomain.com

http://www.mydomain.com/content.php?story=137&lang=en

Judging by the file extension, the script is almost certainly written in the PHP programming language. The script is passed two parameters, story and lang. These are set to 137 and en respectively. The script would probably go to a database and retrieve the content using these two parameters as a key. Finally the program wraps the content in HTML and returns it to the user.

This type of URL is called dynamic and these are probably the first thing to tackle as some search engines find them hard to read, especially where a number of parameters are used. Google will index (spider) dynamic URLs but claims that it will do this more slowly as generating dynamic content puts a load on the web server. The new MSN search will only spider up to an absolute maximum of 5 query terms. They are worried about spider traps. This is where the search engine robot gets stuck crawling through every permutation of the query parameters.

The first point to check is whether the CMS serves consistent and spiderable URLs. If the website cannot be accessed by a machine beyond the homepage, or the URLs change with each access the content will not get indexed. A clue to problems is analysing the log files, if search engine robots are visiting the home page but explore no further there could be problems.

It is probably a good idea to turn dynamic URLs into a pseudo static versions. This is discussed in a little more detail in the database driven content section. It consists of replacing the separators in the query string with forward slashes:

http://www.mydomain.com/content/137/en

and then using some jiggery-pokery on the webserver to make sure that the content-management-system program still gets called when the URL is accessed. This technique falls under the heading of URL rewriting.

Dynamic URLs

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