I am currently using vbadvanced on my vbulletin forum, I am not sure how it works but vbadvanced lets me make new pages that are non-forum. So I have a partners page, How my site works page, etc. but all these pages are index.php?pageid=How-My-Site-Works, not www.example.com/How-My-Site-Works. Will this hurt my SEO/ make so search engines don't read that content?
Not really. Google has been abel to successfully parse dynamic URLs for several years now. What really might be a problem is is you allow users to keep their session alive without a cookie. This means the software will use a session ID in the querystring to keep the session alive. And google sometimes has trouble with session IDS. I would be sure that you keep the number of parameters you passi nthe query string to about 2 or less.
If possible I would suggest using a url rewrite, if the directory and page has keywords in, it will rank better
Though Google can distinguish between your index and your dynamic URL I have found that many of my main categories got very little recognition from Google until I made my URLs static using keywords in the URLs. Actually many of them became sitelinks about a month after making them static urls. I would suggest doing as shak suggests and using your .htaccess to rewrite the urls. http://corz.org/serv/tricks/htaccess2.php
Walmart and GameStop beg to differ... http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...ficial&hs=UHV&q=inurl:product_id&start=0&sa=N
LOL, I guess with many millions of dollars behind you then you can skip the SEO fine tuning. Of course if you looked at their category main pages you might find something different: http://www.gamestop.com/wii http://www.walmart.com/toys From God's right hand: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-keywords-in-the-url-16976
It does not harm your seo but changing your urls, 301 or otherwise, will NOT increase your ranking. It does not benefit you to simply change urls to add keywords. hope that helps, don't believe the hype. Nigel