CAN MIVA MERCHANT DYNAMIC PAGES RANK HIGH IN SEARCH ENGINES OR ARE STATIC PAGES THE ANSWER?

This article could also be titled "Do You Need to Create Static Copies from Your Miva Merchant Products and Categories to Get Top Rankings?" Miva Merchant store owners must be really confused after attending the recent Miva conference and hearing from certain speakers essentially that static pages are better than dynamic pages for top search engine rankings and than hearing in my session that you don't need static pages for top rankings.  Lets analyze the facts.

1.  100% of the people that I have heard stating that static pages allegedly are better for search engines than dynamic Miva Merchant pages, block search engines from spidering Miva Merchant pages after static pages have been implemented.  How they can be so sure about their claims is a mystery to me.  I saw a testimonial about how converting to static pages had taken one Miva Merchant site to the number one ranking for a particular key phrase. First, nobody else in the top thirty listings were targeting that exact phrase. Second, I went to Word Tracker and searched for that exact phrase. It had been searched zero times in the last 120 days. Third, I then searched for the phrase with Overture's keyword help tool, and it reported zero searches the last month for this phrase. There isn't much to brag about there. JMH has had clients for almost three years with both dynamic and static counterparts listed in the search engines and has monitored their rankings continously. Read about recent changes in Google that now frown upon duplicate content on the same domain.  Claims that search engine spiders can crawl more pages easier when they are static seem to have some merit when it comes to Miva Merchant stores with tons of products. Having a sitemap module like swap link can also help greatly. As you can see from point number 2 below, you don't need the pages to actually be static.

2.  If the single fact of having a .html extension improved rankings, you wouldn't even need to have duplicate static pages.  You can make dynamic Miva Merchant pages appear as static html pages with .htaccess methods.  Pixel Composer has a module called SEO Links that works in conjunction with your .htaccess file to automatically change links created by Miva Merchant to appear as static pages with an .html extension within your site's root directory (/p-%prodcode%.html or /c-%catcode%.html).  However, we do not agree with some information on the page like google allegedly gives Miva Merchant dynamic pages less ranking weight.  We have seen zero evidence of this. Relevance is as relevance does. All things being equal if a dynamic Miva Merchant page is more relevant than another site's static page, it will get the higher ranking. Here is a quote from Matt Cutts, a software engineer from Google, at the 2003 Search Engine Strategies Conference.

"The extension of files (.cfm, .asp, .php, etc.) does not make any difference on the ranking whatsoever. As long as we get the pages, said Cutts, that's all we need."

If you use template-based modules like the ones from Viking Coders, you really don't even need the seo links module.  The .htaccess method described by Pixel Composer can be found around the net and works fine if you manually code the links or use tokens to do so. If you use this method of linking, you should ban Google or all search engines from indexing any links in your store's main directory (i.e. /Merchant2/) as Google and possibly other engines don't want different links on the same domain pointing to the same content. There is detailed Info on duplicate content on the same domain.

3.  Here are two recent examples of comments we have received from our clients regarding dynamic Miva Merchant pages.

"One of the products we resell is going to be featured on the Today Show, and its dynamic Miva Merchant product page is ranked number one in Google!"

"It was costing our company a small fortune for the previous traffic to our store through static pages created by another seo company.  JMH was able to get us so much traffic to our Miva Merchant pages without using static pages and get us so many top five rankings in the search engines that we no longer need to keep paying the other company.  We are extremely impressed with JMH's knowledge and expertise with Miva Merchant and search engines."

Our clients continue to have top rankings without static pages.  We are asked all the time about working with clients to implement custom static solutions for Miva Merchant.  They are surprised when we tell them that it isn't needed and to concentrate on optimizing Miva Merchant itself.

4.  Merchant Optimizer has received lots of hype on the Merchant user list. Store owners have been rushing out to get this module in hopes of getting top rankings in the search engines.  What they fail to realize is that all it does is create exact duplicates of their Miva Merchant pages.  It does zero optimization.  Their time and money would be better spent optimizing Miva Merchant itself.  From above, you can also see that the .htaccess method is available.  If you have an extremely high-traffic store, than Merchant Optimizer is definitely going to help since shoppers browsing static pages cause considerably less load on a server. If your store is not experiencing problems due to server traffic, than stick with Miva Merchant's dynamic pages.

Additional Information:

• Duplicate content on the same domain

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