We are getting more and more requests to redesign websites that have been built using dynamic e-commerce solutions such as Mambo because they perform so badly on the search engines.

To explain the problem:

Static html websites have not changed much since their development by Tim Berners-Lee and the advent of the Web and search engines have become very good at recognizing static websites. In general, search engines can navigate through a static website very easily and thus locate information as each webpage is a separate file held on a server.

Dynamic sites on the other hand are created as the user views the site. In most cases this requires the use of a database, which contains the site’s information, and some kind of scripting setup that is programmed to retrieve the information from the database. How the script functions depends on many factors, but the essential thing to understand is that each webpage is not a separate file but is created when a user performs some activity.

The Problem
The big problem is with how search engines see the site or, in some cases, can’t see it. In general, a static site presents fairly easy to read URLs such as:

http://www.ruralwebdesign.co.uk/cumbrian-website-designers.html

Dynamic sites present a URL that is based on the scripting program that is being run and thus may look more like:

http://www.ruralwebdesign.co.uk/index.php?option=com_phpshop&page=shop.browse&category_id=84e688c3

While in reality the same information will be displayed to the visitor using either method, from a search engine’s perspective these will not be viewed as the same thing. In fact, some search engines may not even be able to locate the dynamic page at all. This then presents a big problem for marketing the website.

Websites using static pages will allow the search engine spiders to follow links from one page to the next and so all the content of the site is available. However many search engines cannot follow dynamic links or "see" the content of the dynamic database so very little of the website is available giving a very poor performance on the search engines.

Google places some importance on the text used in the file name so a file name such as

http://www.ruralwebdesign.co.uk/cumbrian-website-designers.html

will rank far higher for the search phrase "Cumbrian Website Designers" than

http://www.ruralwebdesign.co.uk/index.php?option=com_phpshop&page=shop.browse&category_id=84e688c3c

It may also present big problems for sites around the Internet that may wish to link to a page in the dynamic site since the URL that exists on the link is no longer valid, having been replaced by the dynamic URL. This will reduce your chances of other websites wanting to link to your pages which will inturn reduce your ability to increase your search engine rankings.

With all this in mind we only build sites that are static HTML based and can be optimised for search engines.