[thelist] Search engines and dynamic sites using query strings

[Ben Gustafson]

I have been doing a little research on the issue of search engines and
dynamic sites that use query strings in their URLs. From what I have read on
the subject
(http://www.business2.com/content/channels/marketing/2000/06/01/12283, for
example) and seen from the results of searches for my company's site on the
major search engines, only Google touches pages that use query strings.

A possible solution (perhaps read: hack) I came up with for the search
engine issue is to write an ASP script that creates static HTML pages of all
the pages of the site, which are for the search engines to index. The files
contain the page's content within comment tags, and a Meta Refresh tag that
redirects the browser to the "real" dynamic version of the corresponding
page on the site. An example of one of these pages is at
http://www.lionbridge.com/company/p432l1.htm .

How have others approached the issue of search engines not indexing pages
with query strings? What are people's opinions on the off-the-shelf tools
(such as xBuilder) that allegedly create static versions of dynamic sites?

--Ben
  www.lionbridge.com