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Great shout - done.

It would be great if you could add annotations to the ranking graph so you could easily see when you had added site updates and the effect they had.

I would also be grateful for a key on the graph so you didn't have to hover over the lines to see what's what.

This link might help as well...

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/110316-150000

That's it! Thanks Baptiste - the anchor text is going to be an image and an unoptimised image at that... I knew there was a reason that my brain was kicking up a fuss with this code.  Brilliant, thanks.

Ok, thanks so much for the advice, just to clarify there is a link to the dynamic page and it's address will be permanent so it can be accessed in the browser address bar. Here is the link example that the developer gave:

[If I understand correctly you are saying that this dynamic page can't rank? Even if it is permanently there?

Is that right?](Index.asp?Page=ExamplePage)

According to the book The Art of SEO, my personal SEO bible, if you're not concerned with type-in-traffic, branding or name recognition, you don't need to worry about this. However to build a successful website long term you need to own the .com address and if you then want to use .co then the .com should redirect to it. According to the book, with the exception of the geeky, most people who use the web still assume that .com is all that's available or these are the domains that are most trustworthy.  So don't lose traffic by having another address!

Hi all,

I'm considering creating a dynamic table on my site that highlights rows / columns and cells depending on buttons that users can click.  Each cell in the table links to a separate page that is created dynamically pulling information from a database.

Now I'm aware of the google guidelines: "If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few."

So we wondered whether we could put the dynamic pages in our sitemap so that google could index them - the pages can be seen with javascript off which is how the pages are manipulated to make them dynamic.

Could anyone give us a overview of the dangers here?

I also wondered if you still need to separate content from code on a page? My developer still seems very keen to use inline CSS and javascript!

Thanks a bundle.

Hi John,

I've been looking into this myself and the option that I think we're going to go with is this:

http://www.scriptiny.com/2011/01/javascript-slider/

Not sure whether it can handle video but it's a lovely script for images because it's a tiny js file, it gracefully degrades for users without javascript and it's very pretty!

Hope that helps!

Ooops posted twice - one won't delete so amended this one!

Ok Barry thanks but what about time on page and visitor numbers?  Who would Google credit with those numbers?

Hi Barry - yes that's pretty much it.  The tools that we're using aren't as generic as Flickr and Google Calendar, they're more refined for our business, but you get the gist of it.  Our business relies on promoting content to visitors through search and we're worried that by satisfying visitor needs by sending them off to externally created communities and feature rich events platforms our own content won't be promoted by the search engines which is the sole reason for having a site!

By the way anyone coming to this post might not understand  tl;dr literally means, "Too long; didn't read". I had to look it up!

Thanks so much for all of the great information. This really helps in clarifying my understanding of separate sites, subdomains and hosting. Now just need to work out how to pursuade the business to start building a new community platform internally.

Yep - you've both got it!

This was the question I needed answering:

Just to be clear though, you cannot have different parts of a site hosted on different servers, so parentcharity.com/sales andparentcharity.com/community MUST be hosted on the same siteserver.

and this is the main problem as the function is proprietary:

_If the functionality is proprietary and can't be hosted with the partentcharity, I would leave things as they are until you can afford to re-build the site and just cross link as needed. _

So we're in a quandry, we can't afford / haven't got the internal developer time to build a bespoke community site and the external functionality is proprietry so we can't bring it in-house and are therefore getting little search value from our subdomained community.

Yes - External providers = paid developers and web functionalities defined in urls below (events, communities). We understand that iFrame is a bad solution but it was suggested by an external developer who suggested that they were competant at SEO!  

No problem, for obvious reasons I have to stay anonymous but essentially we have:

www.parentcharity.com
community.parentcharity.com
sales.parentcharity.com

we want to put all of these into:

www.parentcharity.com/community
www.parentcharity.com/sales

but the subdomains community. and sales. are currently hosted externally and in a different programming language

Also the business now requires an events platform but we haven't the resources to build it internally so can it be created externally and integrated and is it even worth doing it?

Thanks.

Hi Barry, thanks for your response - the subdomains are not targeting specific countries and we're aware that they should be brought in from the cold into one subfolder of our main domain. However we're unsure of the best way to do that considering they utilise different technologies to work.

Hi Richard, thank you very much for taking the time to respond but the question isn't about the issues or benefits of subdomains - we already have them and we're looking to consolidate into one domain with subfolders, we know they are not helping.  The question is can we use external providers of web functionality while still building link equity for our main sites or do we have to build and host internally at much greater expense and limited functionality to get credit with the search engine giants even thought we're providing a better user experience?