[thelist] SEO and dynamic URL's

J Nicholas Tolson jtnt at mindspring.com
Wed Jul 7 16:21:58 CDT 2004


On 7/7/04 4:46 PM, "Mr. Tenuta" <dtportnoy at videotron.ca> wrote:

> I just ran into this and found it quite interesting.
> Grabbed the info from here
> http://www.submit-it.com/subopt.htm?tipq=1.2&subans=1
> 
> " http://www.test.com/index.php?page=test
> 
> If your URL contains any of the above elements it is very unlikely that it
> will get listed at any of the major search engines. We recommend that you
> submitting a different URL that is not dynamic if possible."
> 
> I've been creating pages with php templates for faster loading time. Basically
> replacing an include to include that dynamic content. ex:
> include("/templates/" . $test . ".sht");
> 
> Now i find out it's a big NO-NO. I have a new project at hand, and am now
> wondering how can I handle this situation another way? Should I just create a
> different page of includes each time instead of having it dynamic on one page?
> 
> Any suggestions, help and info are welcome, thanks :)
> Lawrence


The basic rule of thumb I've read (and written) about is that if you have
one element in your query string (the part after the ? in the URL) you're
ok. This can be confirmed by the results of this search, for example:

http://www.google.com/search?q=ericksonbarnett+awards&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8

See that the second page returned has one element in it ("?id=250"), so
obviously Google doesn't have a problem with dynamic URLs across the board.
This also seems to be the case for other engines.

However, where you run into trouble is with very long or complex query
strings. The major engines seem not to like these much.

The good news is that there are easy ways around this: rewriting URLs or
generating static pages (as MoveableType does). I like the rewriting URLs
method myself, which is explained in detail here:

http://www.sitepoint.com/article/search-engine-friendly-urls

Good luck.


Nicholas



More information about the thelist mailing list