Dynamically populated pages

[HelenLF]

From an SEO point of view is there any advantage to having separate pages on a website as opposed to one page which is dynamically populated with varying content drawn from a database. In particular, I am thinking of a restaurant website where the menu pages can either be separate pages or 1 page which is populated dynamically with different menus depending on a user selection in the navigation.

[cscgal]

From an SEO perspective, you would want different pages for the varying content. This way, each individual menu would rank in Google when searching for the particular food that it offers.

[HelenLF]

Thanks for the really quick reply. Can I ask would that be the case even if you could have the metatags dynamic as well?

[cscgal]

Because Google search results aren't based off of realtime. Google's spider crawls the web and indexes the content of web pages into its database. Then, when you do a search, you are searching Google's database. (Google recrawls the same webpage either daily, weekly, monthly, etc. depending on how often it feels the content will be updated.)

Therefore, the cached copy (the copy in the database that search results are based off of) is going to be a snapshot of the menu contents just at that one moment in time. Google will assume the webpage always has that content (aka that one menu).

[HelenLF]

Ah, I get it now. Thanks for a great explanation.

[cscgal]

You're welcome. Thank you for marking the thread solved!