Do search engines index fly pages?

[bazz]

Hi,

I have decided that as my, still increasing web site has already over 6000 files and is about 116Mb in size, It is time to utilise more Internet capabilites.

I am replacing hard pages with .pl created fly pages so that at the end up, I should have a couple of stylesheets and four cgi created pages for all of my content.

What I would like to know is, how much of an impact on potential visitors, will search engines make, where my pages are not hard coded, but created on the fly. Will the engines (esp Google), index it properly?


thanks.

[Mhtml]

Google can only see the end result of server side stuff which will be a hard coded page basically.

[edit:] Not just google, anything.

[Nightfire]

From what I read a few months back at work was that Google has upgraded their software and can index sites with query strings and stuff in the urls, but not as good as a hard coded page. Now if this is true or not, I have no idea as it doesn't index my sites, but it does index pages in forums, so i'm kinda lost how it works

[brothercake]

I don't think it's technical so much as policy - if you fully index a dynamic site then you may end up indexing loads of pages which are only slightly different from each other.

But clearly Google does index them ... but perhaps with restrictions or some kind of conditional logic ...

Who knows ... the way past it is to use the "clean URIs" technique of disguising CGI parameters to look like normal folders - eg "domain.com/something/nothing" could translate to "domain.com?a=something&b=nothing" using mod_rewrite in Apache (among other techniques), which is easier for users to remember and type, as well as getting past the ambiguity of whether robots will index the pages.

See this article for more info and speculation http://www.evolt.org/article/Making_clean_URLs_with_Apache_and_PHP/18/22880/index.html

[bazz]

Thanks guys.

Originally posted by brothercake
I don't think it's technical so much as policy - if you fully index a dynamic site then you may end up indexing loads of pages which are only slightly different from each other.

Mmm. My pages are all different in appearance and information but the only difference in the constructuion of the pages is the source of the text graphics and stuff.

Who knows ... the way past it is to use the "clean URIs" technique of disguising CGI parameters to look like normal folders - eg "domain.com/something/nothing" could translate to "domain.com?a=something&b=nothing" using mod_rewrite in Apache (among other techniques), which is easier for users to remember and type, as well as getting past the ambiguity of whether robots will index the pages.

I dont fully understand you there brothercake. My url is along the lines of
ww.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/accommodation.pl?dpt=deptname_dpt

I'll check out the article you suggested.

thanks :thumbsup: