Dynamic pages - ecommerce product pages

[Bio-RadAbs]

Hi guys,

Before I dive into my question, let me give you some background..

I manage an ecommerce site and we're got thousands of product pages. The pages contain dynamic blocks and information in these blocks are fed by another system. So in a nutshell, our product team enters the data in a software and boom, the information is generated in these page blocks.

But that's not all, these pages then redirect to a duplicate version with a custom URL. This is cached and this is what the end user sees.

This was done to speed up load, rather than the system generate a dynamic page on the fly, the cache page is loaded and the user sees it super fast.

Another benefit happened as well, after going live with the cached pages, they started getting indexed and ranking in Google.

The problem is that, the redirect to the duplicate cached page isn't a permanent one, it's a meta refresh, a 302 that happens in a second. So yeah, I've got 302s kicking about. The development team can set up 301 but then there won't be any caching, pages will just load dynamically.

Google records pages that are cached but does it cache a dynamic page though? Without a cached page, I'm wondering if I would drop in traffic. The view source might just show a list of dynamic blocks, no content!

How would you tackle this? I've already setup canonical tags on the cached pages but removing cache..

Thanks

[danatanseo]

Hi Cylo, I'm not sure if saying Google caches dynamic pages automatically is an accurate thing to say. I would say it like this: Google is more apt to cache and index a dynamic page if it is given a SEO-friendly URL.  Perhaps a Mozzer who is more technically adept than I can comment on the accuracy of that statement.

That being said I definitely wouldn't recommend using dynamic URLs (which it sounds like you are not). Here is how you can set up URL-rewrites in your .htaccess file if you are on a Linux server: http://www.webconfs.com/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls-article-3.php

Not sure if that's helpful at all. I hope it is somewhat

Dana

[Bio-RadAbs]

Hi Dana,

Thanks for the reply, so am I right in assuming Google caches dynamic pages automatically? The bot would crawl the dynamic page and whatever it loads, it will cache, even if the page is made up of dynamic blocks?

Thanks for sharing the post, it's pretty close to the existing system. Information is saved in a CMS, and that information is fed dynamically to our product pages. As I mentioned, the original page has a dynamic url, and information on this URL is used for on-site search, but this URL isn't SEO friendly, that is why the page is duplicated with an SEO title and then cached, the end user only sees this

[danatanseo]

In my expierience, the way your site is working is unusual. Most often, even large dynamic e-commerce sites create pages on the fly. They are cached and inexed by Google without problems. Here's a post from Paddy Moogan that might be a little helpful in explaining: http://www.stateofsearch.com/how-to-scale-ecommerce-seo/

I would definitely opt to get rid of the 302s, put 301s in place and allow the pages to be built dynamically, especially if it is a large site (which it sounds like it is). Just my two cents.

Out of curiosity, how do you handle on-site search?