Re: (OT) Google page rank for dynamic pages

(My current "client" was particular worried about this, so i've had to do some R&D on the subject the past few mo's. Some might be redundant w/what others have said...)

every search engine uses its own algorithm for determining rankings, but these are some common means:

~meta-keywords
~meta-descriptions
~meta-keywords or -descriptions compared to actual content (text) in the site.
~text located near the top OF THE SOURCE CODE, gets higher ranking (tables, js/css scripts, etc can push this down)
~text in heading-tags "H1, H2, etc" or bold or linked get higher weight
~links from other sites
~links to other sites
~comparison of words used together in the page vs. the search engine user's inputted criteria to determine relevance.
~they prefer non-script and non-framed pages

as far as .pl vs. .html or dynamic vs. static goes - it's always been easier for search engines to index static content, rather than dynamic stuff. But over the past few yrs, with the growing dependency on dynamic content, search engines have had to evolve their rules and programs and i believe, most can index these pages. And those that can't, won't be long for this world.

HOWEVER...

you can actually use .pl and dynamic pages to increase your ranking. It's called cloaking. It's basically giving a page catered to a specific kind of 'user' -> like requests from certain ip's, user_agents, etc.

now, the bad guys might use it to give googlebot a page filled w/every conceivable word combination, while giving us humans, looking for perl-wisdom - a porn page. But generating (or redirecting a bot to) a static, non-framed, non-scripted page could help your site and ease the work done by the crawler.

I'd say, use what's needed for the site and nothing else. If you needs .pl's - use'em. You have enough to worry about, w/out concerning yourself w/someone else's indexing scheme. THEY are in the business to index your stuff - and if google wants to stay on top - they must continually have to change w/the climate - like the rest of us do - or lose their clientelle. (Others have come and gone in the #1 spot.)

"and the rest of us"... seem to be heading more and more to dynamic (hopefully .pl/perl-) based pages *wink*

('sides, i believe, that - better than any search-engine advertising - word-of-mouth is still more helpful. "If you have a build..." a valuable site "...they will come".) :-)

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