Indexing database driven content

I am building a site in asp.net and the majority of the content will be served from a database. The main page of the site would be a <select> box with X number of products to choose from. Depending on the option selected, the user gets redirected to a new page (something like mysite.aspx?q=product1) and the page is filled with product content and information loaded from a table in my database.

My question is: will major search engines go through my <select> box and index the content from the resulting pages, or will I have to take additional steps to get this content indexed? If so, what additional steps need to be taken?

EDIT:

One additiona开发者_C百科l question that I thought of: let's say that depending on the select box selection the user is taken to mysite/productdetails.aspx?id=123 where productdetails.aspx is a page I created that pulls product data from the server depending on which product is passed in the query string. Would this method of a single page pulling dynamic data be better, worse, or the same as creating an actual separate web page for every product and just redirecting the user to the correct page based of their selection?

Will major search engines go through my select box and index the content from the resulting pages?

No. Search engines will not typically try to complete a form for indexation purposes (they have been working on methods of handling forms for discovery purposes.

Essentially you need to have your content linked - in the traditional sense, via a hyperlink - for it to be indexed. This means internal and external linking.

or will I have to take additional steps to get this content indexed?

Yes, you should consider (if you want to continue using your form method), some form of internal linking approach to your core result-set of data that would be surfaced by the form. This does mean duplicating your efforts somewhat, but is a common practice for exposing data in a walled-garden.

Most common approaches are simply adding a HTML sitemap and linking from each page, adding dynamic links on your pages that are related to your results and so on.

Would this method of a single page pulling dynamic data be better, worse, or the same as creating an actual separate web page for every product and just redirecting the user to the correct page based of their selection?

You can easily work around this with URL rewriting, so that the single page becomes a series of pages - but only do this to make your URLs more usable/understandable, doing it only for the search engines is not always the best idea.

I doubt that robots will index those pages, but more importantly, is this really the best interface for your site? Putting all of your product pages behind a select box? I hate it when websites do this, and I suspect that some of your customers might as well. Why not just go for a more traditional index where visitors can at least see all of the products without mucking around in a form?