Static HTML based CMS vs Dynamic CMS
I was wondering if there are CMS systems which allow to generate and manage the content in the static HTML messages. I have not seen one but I have been wondering if the following website is managed with such a system:
All pages on this news site are HTML pages which are perfect for being spidered and indexed by Google. Correct me if I am wrong but the dynamically generated pages are less helpful in driving the targeted traffic to your website due to insufficient “indexability” by major search engines.
Please let me know what you think!
To clarify, there is no such thing as a "static CMS". A CMS is dynamic by definition. Some CMS's generate static html pages as a cache, but if you see
.html in the URL, it's likely parsed by the CMS just like any other URL (without a file extension) would be.
Anyway, any well-written CMS will be indexed just fine. Page URLs like
example.com/index.php?content=45&system=aa53, of course, are less useful than those that display "pretty" URLs like
example.com/blog/articles/jan-12-2012; but they will still be indexed either way.
Major search engines may even show preference to "pretty" URLs, since they can compare the URL to the page content (to determine relevance, which is important for human usability as well).
I saw the plug-in which appends HTML to the dynamic pages - will it make them look STATIC to google?
I don't understand what your concern is. Search engines do not penalize sites for having dynamic content. Do you see Facebook falling behind in search rankings? Twitter? YouTube? EBay?
yes but I am still a little bit puzzled about the CMS the Dily Mail is using...it is certainly a CMS but all the pages end with the HTML extension (example:
I wonder what kind of the system they are using?
dunno. doesn't necessarily mean that you're getting a static page, though.
File extensions are hints about what a file might contain. If you rename a JPEG image to .html, it will still contain image content. If you open it in certain programs, it will still recognize it as an image and it will not be any different even though it is named .html. But then in other programs, they will think it is a webpage and try to show you the HTML inside it, then determine that it is corrupt and show an error. But either way, it's still JPEG content inside a file with the arbitrary name .html.
On the web, file extensions are even less important. The headers sent by the server usually determine what is shown, and for that reason you can have any filename you'd like for any type of file and it will almost always work in all browsers if the server sends the right header.
Anyway, in this specific case, it's probably a CMS that sends HTML headers for URLs that it interprets dynamically that just happen to end in .html. They could end in .php or .jpeg, or whatever, as long as the HTML headers were sent.
Actually, ending in .html is normal, except that a lot of the time a different extension is used (like .php) because those are dynamic programming languages; but it's not hard to lie to the user and claim it's an HTML file. Look into mod_rewrite if you're interested.
In the case of systems like that (many of them, whatever the ending is), those files don't actually exist. It's just a code that the server interprets and knows what to show as content, from a different file somewhere else.
Daniel - Freelance Web Design | <?php?> | <html>| español | Deutsch | italiano | português | català | un peu de français | some knowledge of several other languages: I can sometimes help translate here on DD | Linguistics Forum