Dynamic Webpage URL? On our site we have hundreds of WebPages that are created out of our database using urls like this one http://www.americanhomeinspectordirectory.com/idirectory/inspectors.php?st=al Does it hurt our webpage ranking in the search engines with the ? in the url? Should I do mod rewrite like this for each http://www.americanhomeinspectordirectory.com/alabama or is it a waste of time? Thanks in advance for your help.
Search engines should be able to index and rank your pages just fine, especially as you only have 1 parameter (which is good). The only reasons to go for the rewritten form is a) better keywords in url and b) looks better to the user. If it's a lot of work, the I wouldn't worry about it. It might be possible to create a single rewrite expression for all your pages. You'd need to change the st=al to st=alabama, and then adapt your code to deal with it. Cryo.
http://www.americanhomeinspectordire...tors.php?st=al can be translated to http://www.americanhomeinspectordirectory.com/alabama by including a .htaccess in the main directory with [begin file] # Enable mod_rewrite, start rewrite engine Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on # This line will change a static url into a dynamic one RewriteRule ^([^/.]+)/?$ /index.php?cat=$1 [L] # The next lines are to get from dynamic to static urls. This way, the urls to # your webpages will be dynamic in search engines like Google. RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php\?st=([^&]+)\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://www.americanhomeinspectordire...tors.com/%1? [R=301,L] [end file] But maybe you already knew how to write htaccess files... Hope to help! Auriga
yes also depending on the age of your site, it may not be worth breaking all of those links (or writing a lot of 301 rewrites), just for the extra keyword in the url.. If it's a relatively new site I recommend you do it b/c it looks much nicer... If not, It's water under the bridge.. Just remember this for next time
Thanks to all. The site is has been around for awhile. We did change the program that runs the site and the pages are now .php The search engines found them and ranked the quick enough but not as high as they used to be. All of our State pages ranked in the to 10 before but now in the top 20. Since the urls did change in the past six months I don't know if I should do it or not?