SEO on dynamic website

[bedynamic]

Hi.

I am hoping you can advise. I have a client in one of my training groups and their site is a golf booking engine where all pages are dynamically created based on parameters used in their website search. They want to know what is the best thing to do for SEO.

They have some landing pages that Google can see but there is only a small bit of text at the top and the rest of the page is dynamically created.

I have advised that they should create landing pages for each of their locations and clubs and use canonicals to handle what Google indexes.Is this the right advice or should they noindex?

Thanks

S

[Seenlyst]

Yes if you're able to create a static page for each major city it will make it easier to put more relevant content into the page, take a look at this example from golfnow.com

Take a look at their sitemap: https://www.golfnow.com/sitemap.xml

They have page that are dynamically generated:

https://www.golfnow.com/tee-times/destination/park-city/hot-deals/search

And also page with static content:

https://www.golfnow.com/destinations/149-salt-lake-city

Booking.com have a somewhat similar approach as well, this is their page with static content

https://www.booking.com/city/us/san-francisco.en-gb.html

Hope this helps

[bedynamic]

Thanks - so should we use canonical to handle duplication that may occur by creating the static pages?

[bedynamic]

Thanks Joseph, should we create static pages and use canonical to handle duplication? Or should we use dynamic URL's in sitemaps?

Thanks

[seoman10]

Be very careful with dynamic content.  It is okay up to a point but it does have a number of SEO implications, although I think it's unlikely you would get a penalty.

One complication is, when a search engine crawls asset parameter and it delivers the specified page that will then be cashed by the search engine and delivered through the search results.  The complication comes if a user comes to the side but has a different parameter set, they won't be able to see the content they came to get!  That is a big problem, your bounce rate will be high which eventually could knock you out the rankings entirely.

I would take the professional approach...

Create static pages for all of your important content, if you want you could still include a little bit of dynamic content providing it doesn't change the page too much.

I would completely avoid the no index option, you have nothing to gain as far as I can see and it could cause a lot of damage.

[Seenlyst]

Hello Sandra,

You will want to make sure that Google is indexing your page for all the locations, you can do that by "Fetch as Google" from search console as well as including those dynamically generated pages into your sitemap.xml.

Since your website can have as many pages as it is dynamically generated I would also create a sitemap for users, a great example would be Airbnb sitemap or Booking.com sitemap (These are sitemap for users, but Google crawl them too.)

You can also see their sitemap.xml specify in robots.txt

https://www.booking.com/robots.txt

https://www.airbnb.com/robots.txt

Here's some read that I think should be useful for you:

https://moz.com/blog/3-seo-problems-on-listings-sites

https://thecontentworks.uk/dynamic-pages-seo-friendly/

Hope this helps,

Joseph Yap