Random pages, how will this effect SEO

[edbarton]

Basically I am considering calling up the index.htm as normal but then this contains javascript which loads a random page out of about 5 other index pages named index1.htm etc.

The question is how will this effect links, backlinks, how SE's treat me, and my Google Pagerank.

Because of possible bad factors, would it even be worth doing?

[awall19]

it would not be worth doing.

[edbarton]

ok then, any other suggestions of showing randomly generated things on the page?

[pabawn]

Learn server side scripting such as PHP.
Place some php code in your page kind of like the following

<?php
$filemod = rand(0, 5);
include $filemod ".txt";
?>

[imaginemn]

No matter what programming language you create this in you will still have the same problem because each page is treated differently with it's own PR.

imaginemn

[younghistorians]

It depends on what your randomly generating. If it's something like footer links, there shouldn't be a problem.

[edbarton]

I need to randomly generate the main page content

[Shannon]

So you don't need many main pages, you just need to put randomly geneterated content into the page.

Create the content and save it as 1.txt, 2.txt, 3.txt, 4.txt

In your index page use a php script to php include one of those files.

I don't really know php so I won't attempt to post the code on how to do that.

[theJack]

You can use php to randomly generate the content. The only issue is that the spider will only ever see the one version it is randomly presented. As far as the spider is concerned, you just update your site alot - sometimes reverting to previous content.

If this is an issue, you could link to non-random versions of each page somewhere in your site and make sure the spiders find those pages.

[awall19]

Originally Posted by cardesign

I need to randomly generate the main page content

to me I think the home page content would be the very last thing you would want randomized???

[edbarton]

It would for me though, because I need news stories and stuff randomised.

[I, Brian]

Randomising content can be a good idea for human visitors - I do it myself - but my personal opinion is that the search engine benefits are negligable. It's something done for human users.

[edbarton]

Yeah, I know that search engines probably won't care that much on the positive side, but if I do full pages with different urls then I'm pretty sure it will be negligible. I am going to look into doing it in different ways using php, or javascript in different areas.