[thelist] RE: keywords and optimization

martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com
Tue Jun 5 05:08:09 CDT 2001


Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers

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SE visibility was a major reason why we changed the URL schema
on the evolt site. As many people will remember, we used to have
query string URLs. Now we have a schema which separates query
elements with slashes, thus appearing to be a 'normal' URL.

Amazon does something similar -
typical URL:
<http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1857994027/qid%3D991306121/sr%3D1-1/026-0067122-0450027>

I *think* that the application running the site is at /exec/obidos
* ASIN is their catalogue SKU schema (similar to ISBN
  (for books it's the same numbers), but with a wider scope)
* qid[etc] Don't know
* sr[etc]Don't know
* 026-[etc] Sesson ID

Another possibility:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1857994027/martin043
* martin043 is an associates' ID (mine in this case) - as soon as you hit the page
  the system generates a session ID and adds it to the URL.


Another one (link from home page to an SKU):
<http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0099422042/ref=w_h_c_hb_2_1/026-7387773-5418024>
* ref=w_h_c_hb_2_1
This is a complex referer tracking tag. I've not done the full analysis, but
the numbers at the end refer to
1st number: Which content container the link was from (books are 2, music items
are 3, dvds are 4, videos are 5, games are 6, software is 7 and electronics
are 8)
2nd number: Which item in that container's list the link was from.

This is therefore a referer from the 1st link in the books list on the home page.

This enables them to track which links are profitable for them, and to
make changes as necessary.

Cheers
Martin




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Subject:  Re: [thelist] RE: keywords and optimization


John Meyer wrote:
> http://www.reallycooldomain.com/path/to/my/asppages.asp?articleid=#
> where # is the number of an article.
> 1.  Will search engines pick up the proper path?

Remember: Most search engines (and I think all major ones) will not
index pages with query strings because it indicates that the content of
the page is not static and it prevents spamming to some extent. There's
multiple ways to disguise the query string though, the easiest and
probably most used involving mod_rewrite on apache servers.


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