What would you recommend as best practice? Our ecommerce site has a lot of PDFs supporting the product page. Currently they are kept in a sub domain and so are all images.

Would it be better to keep them all in a subfolder? I've read about blogs being hosted on a subfolder to be better than subdomain but what about pdfs and images?

thoughts?

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

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

Absolutely,

I would also suggest being wary of Google's EMD update. If you don't have a domain with quality content, it won't rank you high just because you have the keyword in the URL.

I do two things..

1. If you use Google Adwords, use the 'Ad Preview and Diagnosis' tool. You can define Domains, Languages, Device and even the Location.
2. Add /ncr at the end of the Google URL you want to use. For e.g. if you want to use Google.com (www.google.com/ncr) , Google.co.uk (www.google.co.uk/ncr), Google.de (www.google.de/ncr)