[thelist] Non-search-engine-friendly URLs a no-no

Simon Willison simon at incutio.com
Fri Aug 2 10:33:03 CDT 2002


At 08:07 02/08/2002 -0700, Sharon F. Malone wrote:
>Really appreciated the recent thread about a scoring system for web sites!
>Good stuff!
>
>Question: one item was as follows:
>
>- Non-search-engine-friendly URLS:
>                                 20 points
>
>Are we talking about the actual filename you give a web page you're
>creating? I'm presuming so, but wanted to make sure. I know some folks are
>very cryptic when naming their files (as in abo.html instead of about.html).

I would assume we're talking more about the kind of garbage URLS generated
by some big content management systems (generally the ones that cost
hundreds of thousands of dollars just to set up) - I saw a classic example
the other day:

http://www.cw360.com/bin/bladerunner?REQUNIQ=1028301500&REQSESS=x82XZIXR0&REQHOST=site1&2131REQEVENT=&CARTI=114657&CCAT=1&CCHAN=4&CFLAV=1

In general though, any URL with a question mark in it (a query string) can
be considered search engine unfriendly as a lot of the lesser search
engines (i.e the one's that aren't Google ;) ) refuse to index addresses
with a query string in them.

Cheers,

Simon Willison
http://www.bath.ac.uk/~cs1spw/blog/




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