I am going to migrate my website to use a database and list our products using ASP. It will generate pages on-the-fly, pulling the information from a database. I want to know if google and other popular search engines will index these products, since the pages will be created on-the-fly. I will probably use a drop-down menu, when a category is selected it will generate a list of products based on the category chosen. Will google index this? Thanks for your help!

The answer is "it depends". From what you described the answer is probable no. A collegue of mine had the same obstacle on a recent project. This is what I recall about our discussions.

If you have a quasi static ASP page (i.e. if your home page is home.asp) that is not completely dynamic, then you can get google to index it. Google will also follow any links on your pages. But, since you are using a drop-down menu to dynamicly create the list of products this won't work (Google won't be clicking on your select list).

One solution is to create a master links page. Create an asp page that dynamically creates links to all of your products. You can then direct Google to index that page, when it does it can also follow all the links on that page and index those as well. There are specific headers you can put in the document to direct Google to follow the links and to NOT index the links page. I think the term robot is in the meta tag.

Michael J

A second on the "no." Aside from observation, we only know what Google tells us. From these two sources, we know Google does index dynamic pages, but not comprehensively. There is no reason for the googlebot to look at your page x number of times. What you're asking for is basically double recursive indexing, which I've never heard of in a search index. Without extremely explicit search terms (which are rare), it would simply pollute results. Counter-productive even if you wanted to make your own index.

One idea, which I sometimes use, is to make a batch of static pages that contain the results of the drop-down menu (or whatever method you have). Now, I never do every single condition, but if I have target audiences I pick a few conditions and make a seperate document page for these selected outcomes. Depending on the number of conditions, I use a script or just hire someone to type them up. This only works for relatively static outcomes, or small datasets, and can create horrible maintenance overhead. Planning is key.

Otherwise, your best bet is meta tags and inclusion of keywords. I place very little faith in meta tags, however. If I were Google, I would ignore them.