What's the problem with dynamic URLs?

[protheory]

What's the deal with PHP URLs please? I've been reading loads of stuff saying that Google et al say they advise you not to use dynamic URLs etc but then again this forum uses the default ones doesn't it? And I found this place through Google, it must have ranked well for me to get here too.

I just don't understand to what extent search engines have trouble with non HTML URLs. It just seems strange to me that so many products run on PHP and yet so many products also market their ability to rewrite PHP URLs.

I know enough about SEO to know that it's a good idea to link to HTML pages within my site and vice versa etc but this dynamic stuff is throwing me :confused:

[Hell³]

There is no problem on indexing PHP url's as you have seen by yourself. And as has been said by Joey and others in this forum, vBulletin gets indexed very well without the need of rewriting scripts. As far as I know, the only problems could be related to session ID's on the url, but vBulletin doesn't show session ID's on the URL.

[protheory]

There is no problem on indexing PHP url's as you have seen by yourself. And as has been said by Joey and others in this forum, vBulletin gets indexed very well without the need of rewriting scripts. As far as I know, the only problems could be related to session ID's on the url, but vBulletin doesn't show session ID's on the URL.
Thanks, I've read a little about Google having problems with certain elongated queries in url's today after posting this thread. I've just read so much about SEO that I'm confused I think. There just seems to be so much emphasis on rewrites and 'static' url's that I wondered what on earth it all meant in the general good-idea /bad-idea sense.

[cooluks]

The problem with dynamic is on indexing it.. If the pages is constantly changing is it difficult to SEO it... How can build links for it and focus on it..

[edward hamilton]

I only have one .html page on my whole site and that redirects to index.php
The rest of the more than 20,000 pages are dynamic .php pages, including my vBulletin forum.
BUT, most of these dynamically generated URLs don't change. I wish I had used some different names but it's too late for that now since others have linked to many of these pages and I don't want to introduce a lot of broken links to other linked sites.

I completely redesigned the site about 2 years ago and I see old URLs showing up in my error logs. I added my error page to tell visitors that if they came from another site that the link is no longer active and then giving them an opportunity to search my updated site.

Google has found my site and ranked me well for some keywords, not so well for others.

I don't spend a lot of time on SEO, but have a lot of content and the site has been around for more than 10 years, which helps.

Yesterday I used some tips from this forum and link page images to the page on which they appear, and checked all of my ALT text. I've been working on W3 validation but some of the forum pages never validate, so I'll live with it.

[Hell³]

The problem with dynamic is on indexing it.. If the pages is constantly changing is it difficult to SEO it... How can build links for it and focus on it..I understand that, but this thread is not talking about dynamic content, but the dynamic URL's

You can be sure that vBulletin keeps the links constant even if you move around the threads and posts. Thread and post ID's won't change, for example, your post will keep the 70964 ID even if someone decides to move it to another thread, same happens with threads moving around different forums.

Yes thread content is dynamic, but indexed content will remain, unless you allow edits all the time, this is one good reason to put a reasonable time limit to post editing.

[Justin Kemp]

Dynamic URLs are generated from specific queries to a site's database. The dynamic page is basically only a template in which to display the results of the database query. Instead of changing information in the HTML code, the data is changed in the database. But there is a risk when using dynamic URLs: search engines don't like them. For those at most risk of losing search engine positioning due to dynamic URLs are e-commerce stores, forums, sites utilizing content management systems and blogs like Mambo or WordPress, or any other database-driven website. Many times the URL that is generated for the content in a dynamic site looks something like this:

http://www.somesites.com/forums/thread.php?threadid=12345&sort=date