The Difference Between Dynamic Website URLs & Static Website URLs

The websites can be categorized as dynamic websites and the static websites. It takes some good amount of time to create a static page and so, people are shifting towards the dynamic websites as it is pretty easy to create more pages and also, it is easy to maintain a dynamic website when compared to a static one. Now, a dynamic URL is a URL which is created automatically by some script or with the help of the database. On the other hand, a static URL is the one which don’t have any variables in it and is for static pages i.e. if you need to make a change then you need to edit the code to make the change.

Dynamic websites use some script to enter content on the pages with the help of the database and dynamic URLs are mainly the templates which are changed accordingly and automatically to create new pages with different content. Dynamic URLs are mainly used by websites which update very frequently like forums, e-commerce sites and more. Also, if you are using some content management systems like wordpress, mambo which require a database, you are likely to have dynamic URLs which looks like this –

http://www.siteexample.com/forums/thread.php?threadid=12&sort=new

Whereas a static URLs looks like this –

http://www.siteexample.com/page1.htm

You may feel that dynamic websites and dynamic URLs are good enough as they are easy to maintain and update. But, the fact is that search engines don’t like these dynamic URLs. Dynamic URLs include a number of variables like =, & and others and search engines don’t like these variables and so, you may face some difficulty in getting these pages indexed and crawled. Search engines prefer simple URLs and so, static URLs are the way to go. You can also insert keywords in the static URLs which can help you to improve your search engine rankings and this is not possible with dynamic URLs as they use database and scripts to generate the URLs. Static pages are indexed and crawled easily when compared to the dynamic ones and the other advantage is that it is easy for users to understand the static URL and so, they can get the idea about the content available on the page. For example, if the page on your site offers information about ‘Toronto SEO’ companies then a static URL like “http://www.yoursite.com/torontoseo.htm” is much better than a dynamic URL which may appear like “http://www.yoursite.com/p?=14”.

So, static URLs have a number of advantages over dynamic URLs and therfore, you should try to stick with the static URLs. But if you already have dynamic URLs in your site then it would be very cumbersome to re-code every page to make it static. The solution to this problem is the Apache Mod Rewrite Rule which allows you to redirect one URL to another without the search engine’s knowledge. But you need to be on a Linux server to take the advantage of Apache Mod Rewrite Rule.

Therefore, dynamic websites may look interesting as they are easy to develop and maintain but you need to take care of dynamic URLs as static URLs have a number of advantages over dynamic URLs and even search engines prefer simple static URLs. So, you should try to use static URLs instead of dynamic ones.

 

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