Q&A: Database Or Individual Pages For Each Product?

By Kalena Jordan - Fri, 07/27/2007 - 11:27am.

Dear Kalena...

I was thinking of starting an e-commerce site and wanted to ask for your opinion regarding information of the individual products.

Is it better to simply build a separate web page for each product rather than storing them in a database?

This way search engines should be able to crawl them and I may get more visitors.

Thank You,

Daniel

Kalena's Answer:

Dear Daniel

It's difficult to answer this question without knowing your range of products.

Assuming your product range doesn't extend into the hundreds and the specs for your products won't change regularly, I would create a dedicated web page for each product that has it's own URL e.g. www.site.com/catalog/product74855.htm rather than having a single catalog page with dynamically generated product pages like www.site.com/catalog.asp?productid=74855 and www.site.com/catalog.asp?productid=74856 etc.

When a database is used to generate content, some search engines will only ever index a single page.

For example, in the situation above, the URL www.site.com/catalog.asp would be indexed but the product pages wouldn't be viewed as pages in their own right.

Having flat product pages also gives you the opportunity to optimize each one for unique target keywords relating specifically to their content.

With the increasing uptake of the sitemaps protocol, search engines are getting better at indexing dynamic content, but why take the risk?

You might as well make your site as findable as possible right?

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News Tags: Technology, eCommerce, Database

About the author:
Kalena Jordan was one of the first search engine optimization experts in Australia and New Zealand and is well known and respected in the industry, particularly in the U.S. Kalena was one of the founders of htt