Panels and SEO

Hi All,

I have a general question in regards to Search Engine Optimisation. I'm usining panels to display HTML content on my default page. I have read that dynamic content is not read by robots, so i was wondering if content displayed in a <asp:Panel> would be viewable to a robot?

Thanks,

Dynamic content is still spidered by most search engines, they don't index the file, they spider the page that's been rendered. Do some Googling on SEO for the techniques of various search engines. Searchenginewatch.com is a good resource.

Jeff

As far as ASP.NET programming goes, your biggest gain in the search engine world is going to avoid the use of postbacks. For example say you have content within an asp panel. But in order to display that content you use a button and capture click event in the code behind, then you change the property of the panel to visible=true once the button is clicked. This will not work with spiders since they don't "click buttons" so to speak. The way to write the page so the spider will work with it is to use a link, and then pass a parameter via a URL, this could link back to the page if you want, but then in the page onload event check for the parameters values to determine what to display in your page.

Links are much better when dealing with spiders, avoid the postback.

Another thing to look into is the use of a friendly URL handler (or FURL for short). There are many examples on the Web for doing this. What a FURL does is translate the parameters over to a directory structure. For example, mypager.aspx?param1=1¶m2=2 becomes something like: /mypage/1/2/default.aspx. This will enhance the and potentially increase the frequency of a spider doing a deep crawl through your site. You can read evidence of this via the Google FAQ:

"Your pages are dynamically generated. We're able to index dynamically generated pages. However, because our web crawler could overwhelm and crash sites that serve dynamic content, we limit the number of dynamic pages we index. In addition, our crawlers may suspect that a URL with many dynamic parameters might be the same page as another URL with different parameters. For that reason, we recommend using fewer parameters if possible. Typically, URLs with 1-2 parameters are more easily crawlable than those with many parameters. Also, you can help us find your dynamic URLs by submitting them to Google Sitemaps. "

Another issue when generating dynamic pages, and using the same page but either posting back or linking back via a URL. Be sure to change the Title of the page and Meta description. If you do not do this then Google is going to "think" that it is the same page, and the results will not be displayed as high as you would like. It will definitly affect your search results. One way of tacking this is to convert both the title, and meta description tags to HTML controls and then change the inner text, or dynamically generate the text for the tags when displaying different content.

As mentioned previously the other sites will help you with general SEO issues, but the ones I list here are aimed at specifically issues you need to be concerned with when doing application development for the Web and maximizing SEO.

EDIT: I fleshed out my thoughts in an article on my site:

http://www.wwwcoder.com/main/parentid/457/site/6173/68/default.aspx

does asp.net forums have a SEO group?

really need help...