I am creating a site and want to have individual pages for each row in a database table. The information on each page is fairly useful and comprehensive, and it would be really nice if Google could index them.
My initial thought was to just create a single PHP template page and pull the correct information for whatever the user is looking at, but my fear is that search engines won't be able to index all of the pages.
My second thought was to batch-create/automate the process of creating the individual pages as html files (for the 2000+ rows in the table), because then I would be guaranteed that they'd be crawled. However, if I ever needed to make a change to the design, I'd have to re-process them all. Kind of a pain...
My final consideration was to just pick a page in my site and list all of the possible php pages in a hidden div, but I wasn't sure if search engines can index from that. I assume they just pull from the HTML, so it'd be able to find it, right?
Any suggestions? I would love it if I can just create a single page that populates based on what they user clicks, but I want them to be indexed.
Search engines can index dynamic pages so using one PHP file to create thousands of unique product pages will be fine for SEO. After all, each page/product will have a unique URL and will be seen as a unique page as a result. All you need to do is link to your product pages within your website and/or submit an XML sitemap so you can be sure they are found and indexed.
By linking your pages, I literally mean link to your product pages. Search engines find new content primarily through following links. So if you want your product pages to be found you need to link to them. Using form based search is not a good way to do it as search engines generally don't play to well with forms. But there are lots of way to make links to your pages including HTML sitemaps and product category pages which then can link to products in that category. Really, any way yo u an get a link to your product pages is a good way to help ensure they are found by the search engines.