A general rule of thumb, depending on who you ask, and which search engine you're talking about, is that some search engines will index a dynamically generated page, but even if they do, will not follow links to additional dynamically generated pages from that page. If a search engine sees [?] and [&] and [=] in a link, it will perceive that page to be dynamically generated. A typical trick of the trade is to replace the [?] and [&] and [=] symbols in a query string with "search engine safe" characters.
We've taken search engine safe site creation to the next level by automatically creating hierarchies of folders and pages for each manufacturer, category, and product that you sell. You will optimize the folder and file names of your product related shopping pages to best serve you. You will need to have cffile and cfdirectory enabled (or a CFX equivalent) in order to take advantage of the automatic file creation. You can also create the files yourself, which is obviously more work depending upon how many items you have. If you don't wish to use our search engine safe file system, see Traditional Search Engine Safe URLs.
As an example, at the avon.com web site in the shopping section, if you click on Beauty, a URL to list the sub categories looks like this:
With traditional search engine safe URLs, that would look something like this:
Most search engines should index that page and follow links from the page. But, even though it "allows" you to be indexed, it doesn't "help" you with your rankings. Since keywords found in your URLs do play a role in how your site is ranked, that should be used to your advantage. Here is what the links under Beauty could look like on YOUR site if you were selling these same Avon products using cf_ezcart.
Here is an example of what the URLs would look like in a 4 step process to select a product.
Two product maps (index of categories and products in site map format) are also created. One indexed by Main Category/Category/Product, and if you are using the Manufacturers table, one indexed by Manufacturer/Main Category/Category/Product. These maps can be customzed to show 1 level at a time, or a map just to your categories, or of all your products. Links for main categories may be turned on and off, etc. These may be shown alone or included in or linked to from an overall site map.