Dynamically Generated Pages and Impact on SEO

Author: Uday Patel

Dynamically generated pages are nonexistent till they are needed. By nature of development and complexities, they have always posed a huge challenge to search engine optimization professionals. Getting the dynamic page indexed is a major problem as they do not exist till called for.

New CMS brings some new development methods as to how pages are created but in the end, dynamic content is there for a decade. There are several methods to manage dynamic content for SEO professionals.

Dynamic Rendering

This is a process of using the bot to serve content. This means serving a client-side rendered version of your site for human users and a separate, server-side version for search engines. On the server side, the content based on Java Script is served to the search engines. In this case, JavaScript-based content is converted into an astatic HTML version and served to the search engine.

This is not cloaking as it is a completely white hat technique accepted by Google for indexing dynamically generated content. The crawlers see a fully rendered page rather than an empty template.

Dynamic rendering is not cloaking since Java Script is simply converted to HTML

However, if dynamic rendering is misused, it will be cloaking.

What is Cloaking?

When a website carries content that is shown to users different from what is shown to search engines it is cloaking. If this is done using dynamic rendering then it is a violation of Google's terms. You should not serve different content to search engines from what the user sees using dynamic content.

Thus, make sure that content served to specific crawlers is the same as the content that the visitor sees. While using this technique correctly make sure that the loading speed is not affected while being crawled by different agents, especially in the mobile version of the page. Thus, developers should avoid slow-loading pages hence always check the loading of alternate HTML versions created for search engines.

An Alternative to Dynamic Rendering

The other technique is cannonball where static pages are created to represent what would normally be generated dynamically. In this case, the dynamically generated content is hidden from the bots.

You can also use a cannonball along with dynamic rendering there are a few dynamic pages that need to be indexed. This is very resource intensive but works fine.

The top-rated content marketing firms should take these tips seriously. It is necessary to make an SEO impact.