Dynamic website

Hello all,
I have a dynamic website and 95% of my links are with variables like Index.asp?var=var1.var2 I was told that since my site has querystring so that is why my site will never be indexed totally. I have lot of content including Message board with over 200,000 messages in it. I did some research that i can use some thing like URL_Rewrite to rewrite the urls in search engine friendly manner. Currently i am hosting the site on shared hosting and installing url_rewrite is not possible there for that i will have to get the dedicated hosting.

My question is Does converting a querystirng as mention above really helps in SEO and increase in Page Rankings? Does it worth moving to a Dedicated hosting to increase the traffic to the site.

I will appreciate any help.

thanks

If you have a message board with that much content, it'll be worth converting it. But not sure about moving to dedicated server to do it though. Also, regarding variables, you can have 1 or 2 and it should be okay. Session and cook pages will not get indexed though.

dynamic asp pages are not a problem for google.
what engines are you concerned about?

i was concerned about google and yahoo. I have lots of content but none of my pages have any rank except the main url and also i think not much of the content on my site is indexed.

Is there way a i can find out if bots has visited my site and how much content they have indexed. I have acess to all the Raw log files and i also have webtrends.

I think in past it use to be an issue with long variables in url. But not so much now. I have many dynamic sites and they get indexed. I think the biggest issue is people not remove the php session ids from the dynamic websites.

I've read in a bunch of places to 'clean up' the variable strings from "var1.." to something along the lines of "category-name.html" would help. Is there a special redirect or code that is suggested to use?

Also when it comes to cookies and sessions, should they not be used at all or just in a certain way?

Currently working on a new site and our developers just literally began, so I want to make sure that we have the right info from the beginnning.

Thanks.

Prevailing belief today seems to be that G, at least, and probably the other majors, can and will spider dynamic pages with ?/& parameters in the URL, at least up to a depth of two variables, and possibly more.

It is also, however, believed by many that Google will spider them at a significantly slower pace than it will apparently static URLs, mainly because--it is hypothesized--G doesn't want to start overloading servers by hitting up dynamic pages at too fast a clip.

Whatever the underlying truths, since it is simple enough to transparently redirect dynamic URLs to an apparently static form, why not do it, and sleep better at night?

Relatively simple rewrite directives in one's .htaccess file, using the Apache mod_rewrite module, will do the trick.

(They will also looks "prettier" as URLs for visitors to see in their browsers' URL bars.)

--
Cordially,
Eric Walker

Static URL's index much faster than dynamic. Pluss it allows you to use page names for help with ranking.

check out this site... www hammock-central com all of it is using a MOD rewrite yet this whole site is delivered by 1 page and 6 function pages! Got over 100 pages indexed in less than 4 weeks

so then how do you work around session ids and cookies?

currently working on developing a site from the ground up and want to try to accomodate for everything from inception.

so if someone goes to a page, then goes to purchase something and fills out billing info. then goes to purchase another item, wouldn't some of their info be caught in a session id or cookie.

or what about sites that have log ins? then aren't session ids and cookies necessary?

thanks.

so then how do you work around session ids and cookies?

currently working on developing a site from the ground up and want to try to accomodate for everything from inception.

so if someone goes to a page, then goes to purchase something and fills out billing info. then goes to purchase another item, wouldn't some of their info be caught in a session id or cookie.

or what about sites that have log ins? then aren't session ids and cookies necessary?

thanks.

When purchasing and for security that is one thing but I the general population of your site you should avoid the Session IDS (basically on pages that you don't want to spider)