Google indexing dynamic data

[terrakeramik]

Would someone confirm that Google does index dynamic data such as product names and prices on a site if I use a MySQL query to retrieve the data from the DB and display it dynamically using for example <?php echo $row_rsCappuccinoCups['ProdName']; ?>. I am aware that Google may have issues with long, dynamic URLs (which I do not use), but I thought other dynamic data would get indexed. I just don't want to get penalized when I change static product names (which are also keywords) to dynamic names. Thanks!

[dkinzer]

Would someone confirm that Google does index dynamic data such as product names and prices on a site if I use a MySQL query to retrieve the data from the DB and display it dynamically
Yes, Google does index dynamic content. The question is whether you want to allow it to do that or not. You may be better off implementing an "SEO friendly URL" strategy. This usually entails modifying your script to produce URLs like "mydomain.com/product-category/product-name/stock-number.html" and then using ModRewrite entries in your .htaccess to map these back to script invocations with the appropriate parameters. There is some advantage to having your keywords in the URLs.

If you are using osC, there are several different contributions that will do this. I didn't particularly like any of the existing ones so I combined ideas from several of them to meet my specific needs. Here is an example of a product URL for my osC site:
http://www.zbasic.net/Microcontrollers/ZX-24a/p-31.html

In my .htaccess, the line that maps this back is:

RewriteRule ^.*/p-([0-9]+)\.html product_info.php?products_id=$1&%{QUERY_STRING} [L,NC]
In this particular case, the part of the URL precedes the /p-31.html is completely ignored but I could have written more specific rewrite rules. The advantage of not doing so is that I don't have to update the rewrite rules whenever I add a new product.