What is the impact on SEO for an e commerce site the displays products/items information driven from a database (versus each product having it's own HTML page).
Will the SE find the item information ? If not, how do you overcome this issue ?
+2
A:
Create individual pages for each product and use friendly URLs for all of them. These pages can be generated from a database, search engines don't mind at all. It is better for the pages to have a name like http://example.com/products/An-Awesome-Product/ than http://example.com/products.aspx?id=1234. ASP.NET MVC makes it trivial to do such things. With traditional webforms, you can use an HttpModule with a redirect so that the first example turns into the second one on the server such that search engines and visitors don't even notice.
Use a sitemap.xml to let the search engines know about your pages and when they were last updated.
Don't forget that the title of the page is quite important. And it does not do any harm to have decent metadata on the page with keywords and descriptions that are customized for the product.
Definitely do not generate pages with random content or filler content, as decent search engines are quite good at picking out patterns and penalize heavily for illicit behavior. Sadly, I've learned that from personal experience.
DavGarcia
2009-01-25 03:35:45
+1: Good URLs never change.
S.Lott
2009-01-25 04:13:41
And when they have to, they use 301s. But I agree with your point.
DavGarcia
2009-01-25 04:18:27
A:
Thanks for the reply and advice.
I'm new to this so just want to make sure I understand ...
Say the products are homemade crafts and the details are stored in a database (description, material, size, price, etc) and not “hard coded” on a HTML page.
User selects a category and web site lists all the products for that category (using a SQL select where statement).
Then user then selects a product and a product page is created (SQL select where product = xyz and dynamically creates web page).
When google “reviews” the web site will it find all the product details even though it’s in the database and not “static” web pages ?
Sorry if this is a silly/simple question, but seems important.
Thanks, Dave