I'm putting together a big content site currently and of course am hand coding the PHP an MySQL stuff. I was wondering which is better for article URLs: view.php?id=26 or view.php?title=how_to_build_widgets I'm finding the latter case a lot of trouble to code in and am tempted to going back to the first option, but I don't want to make this SEO sacrafice if it really is that important. Also, grabbing content by the title can be unreliable (a title edit could discount previous links to the article) to I considered doing a id and title URL method: view.php?id=26&title=how_to_build_widgets Any suggestions to make this work the best? Thanks!
shortest and human readable urls allways rock. view.php?title=how_to_build_widgets is better than the others
I agree. It's easier for users AND works better for search engines in many cases. If it were my site, I'd invest the time to code it... or in my case, pay someone to code it
I avoided dealing with this issue and simply used ?id=1, etc. and ultimately regretted it. Once my site was up and working with the ?id=1, I couldn't bring myself to go back and mess around with changes. With my newest site, I finally got around to doing it right. I'd highly recommend learning about 'mod rewrite' to make even better URLs than the ones you mentioned. You could get rid of the "view.php?title=" completely. Took me about 2 hours today today get it working right, which wasn't too bad at all. Shouldn't have waited as long as I did...
If you are going to rewrite your URL's, instead of: /view.php?title=how_to_build_widgets Why don't you use: /how-to-build-widgets.html
If possible, do not use ID session. Creat it like /how-to-build-widgets.html this is easy in indexing.
think u raise a good question, which I also have not thought about..... i know that there are various tools used by various scripts like phpld, vbulletin, etc. to rewrite the URL supposedly for better SEO, although it is not entirely clear how it improves SEO. I suspect it has to do with keyword improvement, pretty much like how your domain affects your targeted keyword significantly anyone care to shed more light or confirm this?
Seeing beautiful url's is one thing that really makes a website stand out. I HATE session id's and other confusing parameters in url's. Go for /how-to-build-widgets.html or //how-to-build-widgets.php Use dashes (-) rather than underscores (_)
Hyphens instead of underscores? Is there any verifiable data that confirms this? I've been wondering this myself. Also, can't I do an article grab with both the ID and Title in the URL in case the Title is edited?
Matt Cutts once said hyphens are better. You might want to add another parameter to the database so you can have a different url and title and edit them independently.
You may want to refer to the following post from a Google Engineer: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=r...35Mw8XJnGHEhm9hnw&sig2=WxrNAsYFanfaSF7DS_1W7w