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Can Google crawl dynamically generated links?
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Thanks in advance!
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A few years ago I added a location finder which then auto generated product content for ERIKS. This generated 1000's of URLs overnight, the problem was Google thought I was spamming it's indexes. Google does follow all links on a web page/sitemap however it's what it does with them that counts. The ERIKS Hose Technology Site http://www.eriks-hose-technology.com relies on this type of coding using Classic ASP.
I have a number of other sites which also rank highly on Google You'll find Revolvo by searching for 'Split Roller Bearings'. So it's also not as bad at ranking as some people may tend to think. I would agree however that English URLs are better than coded. The main issue here is to make sure that your main keyword is in the URI to ensure that Google knows what your page is about.
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For the most part, Google can crawl any links on the page, but I think I could do with a little bit more information about what pages are being linked to and how the links are being generated.
If you are using javascript or even (shudder!) Flash to generate the links then search engines will struggle to see them.
If it's in html then it should be fine, but you need to be careful of duplicate content. If a single page can be called up by multiple dynamically generated URLs then it can harm search ranking if rel=canonical tags have not been used.
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Hi,
For the most part, Google can find their way well around dynamic pages with few problems. There are always going to be exceptions, but this tends to be when there are lots of parameters to the URL structure.
As long as it is pretty simple, you shouldn't have any problems.
-Andy
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Well, it can crawl anything found on a web page. If you are referring to a page whose links are dynamically generated in the sense that you build them before serving the page (php for example), then yes. If Google bot reaches that page in any way (it is not blocked etc) then your links will be crawled as well.
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