The answer for this is probably the opposite of what I have currently set up since that will require more work When you have the keywords for a page in the URL, is it better for the URL to look like a file or a directory? For example: http://site.com/Keywords-As-Directory/ or http://site.com/Keywords-As-File.html Im guessing that the second way is better, since the first will most likely serve the document up as 'index.html' or something like that. The change shouldnt really be difficult with mod_rewrite. I just want to make sure I do it the most effective way. Thanks for your feedback!
Why not just do both and use http://site.com/primary-keywords-as-directory/secondary-keywords-as-file.html ? But this brings up another question for me...you mention using mod_rewrite...How do rewrite URLs which redirect to another page (302) get counted by search engines? Are they totally discounted? Therefore, would one be causing more damage than good by creating rewrite URLs as indicated above that actually redirect to another page on the site? Take a look at http://all-in-general.com/maglite to see how I have used mod_rewrite to incorporate a keyword into the URL. I would like to know if this is a useless practice? Thanks for your time. KrnlPanic
This is like the blind leading the blind here, but here's my take. According to Yahoo's robot (http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp/slurp-11.html) for a deep link 302 redirect they index the first page, not the final page. So they would keep your /maglight/ page and not the /index.php?cPath=51_200 page. That said, if a bot where to hit just the .php page, they might not even see the nicer URL. I'd say you'd be better off with a 301 redirect from the script page to the /maglight page, but that would take a bit of work to setup the backend for that. I ended up changing my links using 301 redirects in the following format - index.cgi?[rec number] -> /recipes/[rec number]/[dashed-rec-name]/ index.cgi?[category] -> /categories/[category name]/ I also went to a tableless CSS layout with w3c validated xhtml transitional markup(cut the page sizes by more than 1/3 even including the CSS), filled out my meta keywords based on the recipe name, and made correct use of headings and emphasis. The site I made the changes on has been consistantly at 1k uniques a day for the last year, so if the changes have any effect it should be pretty obvious. Thanks for the reply.
The spiders have been going crazy on the site since I made the change, hopefully it will all turn out for the better. I have always gotten great traffic from google, but almost none at all from yahoo and msn. One thing that does scare me is that I made a change on the blog that I host Adsense Notifier on. I changed the link (using a 301 redirect) from /?p=3 to /3/adsense-notifier/ - I used to be on the front page for a Google search for 'Adsense' and now I dont see myself listed on the first 3 pages :/ Hopefully it will all work out though.
Just an observation: if you use http://www.site.com/folder/target-keyword/ you can leave out the index.html part. The search engines will remember the path without appending index.html or index.htm or index.php or whatever. For me this is an advantage on the long term – because the site it more maintainable and because if you change the extension, (from html to htm or php…) web spiders don’t need to reindex your page. Also, if you use http://www.site.com/folder/target-keyword.html and the user goes to http://www.site.com/folder/ it will see a directory listing and not the web page (unless you configure Apache to serve the right file – but that means even more work) Does anybody see any disadvantages with my approach ? Regards, Razvan