How much dynamic content is too much?

[joegrape]

Hey everyone!

I'm trying to wrap my brain around the concept of dynamic pages and their indexability by Google. I get why dynamic URLs are an issue. But one expert I read wrote this as a definition of dynamically generated content that is problematic for ranking: "...a web page that displays different content every time it’s opened." That is demonstrably false. You will often find pages in search results that have dynamically generated ads - displaying different content every time the page loads, and often tailored to the user depending on the backend serving those ads. And Amazon product pages show up in search results even though there are several areas of content on an Amazon product page that change with every user.

I guess it boils down to what "different content" means. It can't possibly mean any piece of content on a page. It must mean the "main content" of a page - what Google thinks the page is supposed to be about.

Or another way to put it: How much dynamic content is too much on a page?

Here is the specific issue I'm trying to solve. I have a client pulling in information from a database into a template on Wordpress. I'd like to optimize the template for a specific phrase, and then pull in the database content that matches the term into a specific section of the template. The page URL is not dynamic, and therefore will not change.

My question is: Will Google have trouble indexing this page?

Thanks,
Richard

 

[Conor Treacy]

Hi Richard,

The short answer is no, there would be no issue.

You're doing all the leg work before anyone gets to the page. You're specifically going after a "topic" and then just pulling that data from the database. An example of this would be posts. I want to show "travel" posts on a specific page, and then I modify the query to pull all posts from the database matching travel. While this is dynamic content, it's all specified ahead of time, and Google can index it.

Where the issue comes is when you're pulling dynamic content based on an action a user took, their location, or the URL they came from (or cookie). So, I want to show one set of content if the GEOIP shows "Nebraska" and a different set of content for some in "California". This is where the problem sets in.

The solution, in that case, is to have a set of content that is the default, and then replace content if they're from a location. The indexed portion in Google will always be the default information and not the other content which was dependant on the location of the user/browser/cookie/path etc.

 

[joegrape]

Thanks Conor! That is the clearest explanation I've read on the subject.

Richard