Googlability and mod_rewrite

I'm currently exploring mod_rewrite to replace query strings in my URI's and I found this tool http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/mod_rewrite-rewriterule-generator.shtml

However, I want to convert

http://www.training-directory.org.uk/directory.php?cat=Business-Customer%20Service

Code (markup):

to

http://www.training-directory.org.uk/Business-Customer-Service.php

Code (markup):

but the tool tells me that

What would be a better outcome in terms of SEO,

http://www.training-directory.org.uk/Business-Customer-Service.php

Code (markup):

or

http://www.training-directory.org.uk/directory/cat/Business-Customer Service/

Code (markup):

??

TIA

 

I think it would be better if you have some thing with .html as extension.

In fact I have converted one of my entire phpbb to display pages as .html and that has given very good results.

 

If I give it an htm extension with mod_rewrite, will the php still be parsed?
(I feel like I am tinkering with that which man is not meant to know! )

 

Um...not exactly.

That's from Google's Webmaster Facts page http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/facts.html. I have had files as both .php and .html and both have been crawled and indexed just fine.

 

Finally and end to this age old extension debate ... I've noticed no different in ranking between html and asp.

 

I'm not overly bothered by the extension, but would like to rewrite the query string to give a static URL, which (although I've seen sites indexed well with query strings in the URL) I understand the current thinking is that they are better than dynamic ones.

How would you mod-rewrite

http://www.training-directory.org.uk/directory.php?cat=Business-Customer%20Service

Code (markup):

to something more friendly to Google?

 

Yes, it will

Remeber if a spider *thinks* it's spidering a flat html page then it will hit them much faster than if it *knew* there was server side processing going on...

 

Yup completely agree! atleast initial indexing in the search engine would be fast.

Now this site : www.gutfeel.com/forum has phpbb forum, but as a guest user, one would see php pages parsed as html pages. However, if some registered user logs into, it shows pages in normal .php?= mode (SE's don't register in a forum )

 

Here is one more similar tool:http://www.mod-rewrite.com/rewrite-tools/ But this one also not accept hyphens.

 

i have been looking for a mod_rewrite helper.. thanks for the link