SEO for dynamically generated pages

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Ranu Jain: Hi,
  
  I am working on a travel website where people can select the destination, whom they want to travel with, no. of days and month. Our plan is to save all these search results (that are generated dynamically) in the our database and would like to rank them.
  
  To avoid the space issue and load on the website, we have decided to create a file where we will give the link to those dynamically generated pages. Eg:
  
  File 1
  
  mumbai.htm
  delhi.htm
  chennai.htm
  hyderabad.htm
  
  The above file will be present on the website and when user clicks on mumbai.htm, it will take user to the dynamically generated page, which will be kept somewhere in the database.
  
  My question is can search engine crawl those dynamically generated pages?
  
  Another question is related to the URL structure, is the below URL seo friendly?
  
  http://travel.com/mumbai/family-infants/wildlife-heritage/5364abs
  
  We are adding this id to make the pages unique.
  
  TIA
• 
  Dave Elliott: obviously the number at the end isn't ideal due to not being descriptive but if the url is permanently accessible and you canonicalise properly it shouldn't be an issue.
  
  This kind of situation happens all the time with e-commerce sites ;
• 
  Suraj Gadage: +Ranu Jain ;It's a very interesting question.
  
  Technically speaking, the pages that are going to be generated dynamically based on get requests in the URL can be converted  ;into static/SEO friendly pages such as www.example dot com/destination-abc or www.example dot com/destination-xyz. Now with search friendly URL's you can generate an XML sitemap and submit it to Google/Bing Webmasters tool. Just another thought you could gather all the search results from your database and generate an XML sitemap with the static URLs (created from dynamic URLs). You're allowed up to 50k URLs per sitemap.
  
  Now let's discuss the pros and cons of this strategy.
  Pros: (I don't see any with this strategy)
  Cons:
  1. You will end end up creating many pages with internal duplicate content
  2. You won't be able to list all these pages on the navigation or other places in a logical or consistant order
  3. [Most Important]Auto-generated content & search results in search index violate Google guidelines
  
  If I were you working on this task then this is how I would execute it.
  
  1. I will do a thorough and comprehensive keyword research to identify all possible keywords that are related to my business(in this case specifically destinations)
  2. I will group all the keywords into different destination themes and create webpages
  3. I will list these pages in to logical or consistent order on the navigation menu
  4. [Utilizing your idea] I will record these dynamic searches in the data base and analyze them. But I won't let them index in the search results
  5. I will try to find common search patterns that are searched on the website and then create a new webpage/article
  6. I will make this as an on-going activity (may be once a month) and continue adding new content based on the search patterns I discover
  
  Hope this helps!
• 
  Tapas Dey (Submitcube): 1) If you want to index then you must create an xml site map and put these urls there.
  2)number in the last is not an example of SEO friendly url.