Dynamic URLs

Dynamic URLs are Internet addresses that are created and displayed to users at the same time as an Internet browser request.

Definition

Dynamic URLs or dynamic web pages and denote web addresses consisting of server name, destination file name, and an ID or other parameters. This ID refers to text, audio and image content that is read from a database and output on request. Dynamic URLs are mainly used in online billing systems, interactive apps as well as online shops.

Background

You can embed dynamic URLs as dynamic links in a web page, and thus call up and display special dynamic content with a mouse click.

An example of a dynamic URL:

https://www.dynamische-url-beispiel.de/index.php?id=42

URLs of this type are mainly found in online shops, as the articles currently available play a particularly important role there. After all, customers don’t want to see items that aren’t available.

advantages and disadvantages

Pros:

• A dynamic URL automatically adjusts the links with each update. Thus, profound HTML knowledge is not necessary. Content such as text, images, audio and video are published via a user-friendly interface.
• Meanwhile, dynamic URLs are almost standard and static links are the exception. Extensive websites can hardly be managed any other way.

Disadvantages:

• If the content can only be distinguished by the ID in a database, the URLs become uniform and you can only identify them by the appended digits as well as other identifiers. Dynamic URLs are statically represented within a web page as a tag of a link, which is why the user interface does not show any changes. This can lead to the same URLs displaying different content.
• Because dynamic URLs have long been considered problematic as well as not search engine friendly, many have changed them to static URLs on recommendation or left a double of the file. This should make it easier for search engines to evaluate website content.

Importance for SEO

Dynamic URLs are widely used and often considered best practice. The problem: Crawlers are not always able to classify dynamic URLs or to assess them unambiguously. Therefore, you should consider various factors to ensure crawlability, access for the crawler.

• If you use a dynamic URL, duplicate content can quickly arise because the same content is accessible via different URLs. You can prevent this with Canonical Tags or by blocking parameters in the Google Search Console. Redirects or the mod-rewrite module can also help.
• A dynamic URL faces the accusation of having a worse click through rate in search results pages. However, if sensible parameters are set, the search engines, which are learning more and more, can now cope much better with a dynamic URL.
• With a dynamic URL you should pay attention to semantics (word name), because dynamic URLs often do not describe the page content with keywords. Therefore, you should generate dynamic page titles, keywords and a description of the created website in the meta section of it.
• If you create dynamic content, make sure to make it more search engine friendly. You should keep the code as lean as possible, avoid unimportant parameters and keep the URLs as short as possible. And: don’t hide any necessary parameters, for example by rewriting them in static URLs with loss of information.
• For menus, navigation or footer links you should always avoid a dynamic URL, otherwise the linkjuice can suffer. These links should be static in order to be interpreted correctly by search engines. The same applies to text boxes whose contents you can only access via scripts.
• Unfortunately, dynamic URLs are not very user-friendly: if they are not entered correctly, users can end up on a 404 error page, which can result in an increased bounce rate. Also, these URLs are mostly unsuitable for social media.
• If you use Google Analytics for web analytics, you have to be careful to create the dynamic URLs exactly and use normal names for them, especially when creating target projects or funnel steps.

Conclusion

Dynamic URLs allow you as a website owner to use important keywords in the URL. According to search engine operators, search engines can  URLs with parameters in the meantime. You can also use dynamic URLs into static URLs convert.