Hi guys. I've been looking over the forums at phpbb, and found a few mods that change your pages from this: .php?forum=1 ---- and changes them to this: forum1.htm Is there any real improvement to doing this? Some of my pages get into google. One of my highest searched terms brings up this page: /videos/?type=Phones -- would this really be better? /videos/type.phones.htm All of my games on my site are done like this .game.php?name=GAME.swf would google prefer .game.name.game.swf.htm Thanks for any advice on the subject. (p.s when putting pages into a site map, do you list all the dirrent page varibles that bring up differnt content, or would i just add the one page: game.php or go through all of them game.php?name=1, 2, 3, etc.) Cheers.
Personally my sites that have forums are all indexed in Google. I haven't made any changes to give them the "nice" URLs. I don't think Google or any other major search engine has a problem with the URLs that contain query strings.
I think there is more duplicate content on pages with url parameters than on rewritten pages because people using mod_:rewrite tend to think a lot about the url structure. So maybe google does like rewritten pages a little bit better, but probably not significantly. What is much more import in my eyes is, that a nice rewritten url with .htm ending make a url much more understandable for the average user. Everyone knows about directories and files, but have you ever tried to ask your parents what questions marks and ampersands do in a url?
Well a rewrite helps make it a clear hierarchy imo Would suggest to me that Google is happy with that structure. Just my 2cents worth Jamie
Google can index url's with a ? in them no problems. If you are wanting to include keywords in your url then you should use mod rewrite (keywords included after the ? are not weighted as much as keywords in a static url). eg /folder/keyword.html is better than filename.php?id=keyword
As I said, you should simply see it from the users side. Image you are searching for a hotel in las vegas. Which link would you click: http://my-small-hotel-site.com/hotel-las-vegas.html oder http://my-small-hotel-site.com/?prodid=12345 ?
chengfu is right, the first is easier to understand. The query string can be confusing because of the length of it, and the use of variables that are not easy to understand. i.e. t= and p= ... where t means thread and p means post. Overall it can be quite confusing to a user. But I don't think it affects your site being indexed. Either URL will be indexed, it's just that one is easier to understand for the user than the other.
Re-writing the url just allows you to get keywords in the url. If you think this will help your site in the serps then go for it. If not then query string url's are fine.
I really don't think Google cares at all... Over 1M pages showing for this forum in the Google index... [search=google]site:forums.digitalpoint.com[/search]
I don't think that Google hates ?= or any other dynamic content page, except for maybe extended properties, such as "&id=" those are extended properties like site.com/topic=4 (topic is about weather) this one is ok. Google likes it. but site.com/topic=4&id=miami (topic is about weather in miami) Google doesn't like you at all. But I still think the page get's crawled. In all honesty, i really don't think that users actually pay attention to urls. Most internet users look for a subject, se it as a search result, and click on the page. It's that simple. Besides, it's not in Googles' best interest NOT to crawl pages with querystrings in them. Their very reason for existing is to provide relevant search results. That's it. I'm sure that one of the largest technology juggernauts on the planet in search technology has figured out a way to GET content. I think that a url string has to be so incredibly bad formed and funky, that google would crawl it, but put it WAAAAYYYYYY back there in the SR's.