I've been reading about SEO for my dynamic website. From wt I learned, dynamic URLs are not Crawler friendly and usually crawlers ignore URLs with queries and ?-& signs.

 

My site is dynamic and is a small stock images site. When I search for my images I get results for my works posted on Istockphoto.com and Dreamstime.com but not from my website, although I have friendly URLs and submitted xml sitemap to the search engines.

 

My question is... how comes istockphoto.com and dreamstime.com are being well indexed despite their dynamic URLs, same things with forums.. how comes forum posts rank high and get indexed despite their dynamic URLs...

 

Anyone can help me understand this?

they will still be indexed, i have many pages with dynamic urls most indexed, some with up to PR3 with medium strength search engine placments.

 

Thats not the problem, the problem is these urls are not descriptive, as such will not perform aswell, the largest difference is dynamic urls are not user friendly, other disadvantages are you can't include these urls in sitemaps I know google spits these back out.

 

However there are times where dynamic urls are essential, these include dynamic content ie search results. The reason you would not use a static url for search results is you can't share or bookmark urls ie if google used the url http://www.google.co.uk/ and posted data to itself instead of using the get method I would not be able to share the folowing url with you: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q...earch&meta=

 

Basicaly use static urls where posible and use dynamic urls for dynamic content that will change regularily.

Thank you mike it was comforting to know that my pages will get indexed

as I said my URLs are very friendly and simple, such as

http://www.duettographics.com/items/11/Stock Illustrations/Humor/1/

While the URLs from Dreamstime.com come like this

http://www.dreamstime.com/P******-cow-image3478838

My site is pretty similar to istock and dreamstime

This post URL on the forum is

http://www.webdesignerforum.co.uk/index.ph...&qpid=99338

istock, dreamstime and forums score very high in ranking though they have Dynamic URLs, yet when I searched for content from my site I couldn't reach anything.

 

I wanna know wts their secret?

I had a quick look at your website, looks nice, but the reason you will find it difficult to get high rankings is because google does not know what your website is relevant to. This is due to the lack of content in the form of plain text. for exaple an introductry paragraph could be added to exach page. This paragraph could explain to the user what the page is for (example pages you could include this on is the home page and the free gallery page).

 

I would also reccomend linking more of your website, (even if it's links in the footer) from your blog.

 

Internal links are just as important as external links.

 

Another thing to think about is link / directory depth. This should verry much resemble a kinda sitemap structure.

(example http://www.duettographics.com/page/about-us/ -> http://www.duettographics.com/about-us/)

as there is no content in page any sub-directories will find it harder to be indexed. (tip: google prefers a maximum of 4 nested directorys). If you are to change page urls remember to use a 301 redirect.

 

If you havn't already build a sitemap and submit it to major search engines, google will tell you if it does not like any urls subbmited.

 

also google will probably like the page http://www.duettographics.com/page/sitemap/ because it shows link nesting in the content and it'll know it's your sitemap, just change http://www.duettographics.com/page/sitemap/ to http://www.duettographics.com/sitemap/.

 

Last tip for the day, register for google webmaster tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard?hl=en_GB).

Thank you a lot Mike, i can never thank you enough for your generous reply.

According to what I found on SEO online, directory depth could be a problem specially if the path is deeper than 3 levels. I hope I'm on the safe side but you are right it would be better to have a shorter path, the URLs are defined by an array inside the site's PHP script I'm sure my developer can fix that

 

As for the descriptive paragraph, I made sure I added description and keywords meta tags inside each page, yet as you already know, the crawler can't find a solid HTML page to read. Did you mean including the paragraph inside the page's content? cause google already archived my about-us and contact-us and work-policy pages very well.

 

And yes I'm already a member in google webmaster tools, great service, I've submitted my site map there already yet I'm still surprised I can't easily find my content online. I've also subscribed in google analytics but failed to set up right, it doesn't read all the activity on my website though I did my best with their tracking code, I think if dropping it since I already can use the statistics from my CP, and of course we have google apps which is another great service to use.

 

I still wonder what kind of methods are followed in the cases of other stock sites and forums, since I plan on starting couple of websites that could include a forum and dynamic content... you got any tips for that?

 

Thank you again so much for your help and glad you liked my website.