[ Blog Home ]

Search engine friendly URLs

Here are some tips to make all your dynamic urls crawling by spiders.

(Taken from SEO News - September 7, Issue #135)

Unfriendly dynamic URL's are a common side effect of using a Content Management System that is not designed with search engine rankings kept in mind. Here are some examples of some unfriendly URL's:

Sample 1:
http://www.mydomain.com/myproducts.php&354=prod333&subproduct

Sample 2:
http://www.surfboardsatsea.com/boards/filename.php?id=F98ZF4
&productId=39222&ion=wicked&brand=582&template=532

These URLs are problematic because a search engine may consider these addresses too complex to spider. Why too complex Suffice it to say that the more complex the URL, the higher the chance that a search engine robot will consider the content too dynamic to read; it changes too often to be valuable to a search engine.

The way around these types of URLs is actually not so difficult; it may only require a small investment of time and money. The 'time' will be required when researching which URL fix is right for your system. The money may be required to pay a programmer to implement and test the new URLs. Here are how the URLs might look once they are fixed to be search engine friendly:

Sample 1 Fixed:
http://www.mydomain.com/myproducts/354/prod333/subproduct/

Sample 2 Fixed:
http://www.surfboardsatsea.com/boards/wickedboards/39222/board532/

These URLs are better because they do not include the extraneous characters that are so telltale on dynamic websites. In addition, the URLs are designed to appear like normal website directories when in fact they are dynamic URLs.

Important: it is vital that you minimize the length of the URLs that you use. Search engines may stop crawling a website if there appear to be too many subdirectories. The samples above show fixed URLs that have about as many subdirectories as I would allow (4).

[ Bookmark to del.icio.us ]

Comments:

No comments yet.

Your comment:

Name:	E-mail or Homepage:
Enter Verification Code

Free SEO Book

101 Essential Tips & SEO Tools

101 essential tips on search engine optimization, seo tools for analyzing your website and search engine / directory links.

Download free SEO ebook

• How to overcome Google's minus 30 filter
• Google Search Operators
• Six SEO tools for Firefox
• URL canonicalization: Matt Cutts' advice
• Search engine friendly URLs
• Directory submission - Increase your site popularity
• Use your H1 tag effectively
• Blog submission links part 1
• Is robots.txt file a must?
• Setting preferred domain name in Google indexing