Are ? negatives in SEO to Google?

So I am on a go to meeting with this company seo-inc to hear out their suggestions and the representative just told me that having a ? in the URL is a huge no-no and troublesome to the search engines because it says that they are a dynamically created page.

Any thoughts on this as I would disagree seeing DP and facebook also use ? in their url's but please fill me in if I am missing something.

 

Yeah, otherwise known as an affiliate link....

Directories of all sorts do not like them.

 

#!, it's what FB is doing and dynamic pages was just a topic of discussion here on DP (albeit a short-hijacked one).
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1876461

 

i wonder why they don't use vbulletin-seo-products here in digitalpoint , maybe because they are famous enough so they are a bit lazy or maybe they got into troubles for old indexed pages

 

I was just on FB and WebmasterRadio.FM said this "Getting a kick out of the subtle changes being made by Facebook". I wonder if that was what they were referring too Brad? What are the implications of FB incorporating that standard? Nevermind the last question I already know the answer after sitting here thinking about it. Either way I thought facebook was all about networking anyways not link building.

 

You can know more about url structure for your website from here - google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=76329

 

that is not true!

for example, all the artciles submitted to ezinearticles starts off with a ? after the main domain and the URLs look like this: http://ezinearticles.com/?postname&id=xxxx

eza is one of the best article directories out there where lots of top notch SEO people submit their articles, or submitted there at some point of time. if there was an issue with ? on the URL, then i'm sure eza would know about it and structure their URLs accordingly.

 

yeah .. i too dont think that ? is bad for our site .. there are lots of sites that are using dynamic links and the same or on the top... i dont think that there is such a issue in using ???

 

I didnt think so either but this SEO-INC company who is trying to sell an overpriced package critqued that and a cannocial thing like http:// vs. http://www. where the search engines can now determined the differences even if they didnt fix that 10 years ago when they started doing seo.

 

Hmmm, lots of bad information here, no - having a ? in the url does not make it an affiliate link. Yes - google slightly prefers static pages. To fix this issue you need to use the apache module mod rewrite - the seo guys should know what that means, it is important but not critical, cheers!

 

wouldnt the apache module mod rewrite change the url? And than I would have to change all the backlinks to the old url correct?

 

can I still have a top ranking with the ? even if the page isnt dynamic and how does the changing of the url affect its PR and the links pointing to it already?

 

dynamic pages was more considerable, for me it has a less of work if you want to have a website ranking.

 

I don't think it makes a difference however rewriting the urls gives you the ability to put the keyword in the url..

site.com/?p=33
or
site.com/my-keyword/

which will make it rank higher

 

Google indexes just about every thread from this site and they all have question marks in the URL.

 

all I know ? which is a variable refer to something and not just a question mark that would be vital to address a certain web page.

 

I am agree with sultanofseo

 

Will URL-rewrite be of any help?