Hi, My ecommerce site was launched 3 years ago and uses dynamic URL's and I am considering asking my webmaster to change all my pages to keyword static URL's Question Will this have any adverse affect on my site? For example, what happens with respect to all of the one way keyword anchor text links that I have pointing to page A if the URL for page A is changed from a dynamic URL to a static URL? How does this affect my relationship with Google if google has indexed my pages with dynamic URLs if they then become static URL's overnight? Thanks
There is a better way to do this. If you can use mod_rewrite you can leave your current site as is, and use the keyword links to point to the dynamic pages. for example if a request is made for yoursite.com/new-products/televisions/lcd/rca/50-inch/ your server using mod_rewrite would actual serve the content from yoursite.com/index.php?page=products&category=2 check out: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html http://www.workingwith.me.uk/articles/scripting/mod_rewrite http://www.addedbytes.com/cheat-sheets/mod_rewrite-cheat-sheet/ Google will pick up both pages after a while. Google will see it as a case of duplicate content and only display one or the other in the search results. If you submit a sitemap to google with webmaster tools. I think google will use the urls in the sitemap in the search results(I think).
Google will be fine with as long as you take care of redirecting web pages using 301 redirects. You will need to 301 redirect each old dynamic URL to its corresponding new static URL. As the previous poster said, this is often quite simple using Mod_Rewrite, assuming your site is hosted on an Apache web server. The 301 redirect will cause all of the search engines to transfer credit for all inbound links pointing at each old dynamic URL to its corresponding new URL. You'll likely notice a temporary drop in rankings and traffic when you first put the 301 redirects in place. But once the search engines recrawl all inbound links from other sites, discover the 301 for each inbound link, and transfer credit for each inbound link to the new URL, you'll be fine. At Google they will also remove the old URL from the index and start showing the new URLs instead.
Thanks for the information. Is this a big job and is it likely to be expensive to get my webmasters to do this?
It depends... On things like how many URLs you have... how you intend to map new to old URLs... whether there is some pattern to mapping new to old... etc. I certainly wouldn't attempt it without using Mod_Rewrite/.htaccess files. If you chose wisely and develop a pattern for mapping the new keyword rich static URLs back to the old dynamic URLs it can be a piece of cake. If the old URLs were like: with Mod_Rewrite you could easily implement static URLs like: but behind the scenes continue to URL rewrite to the old example.com/index.php?cat="tv"&subcat="widescreen"&product="Sony Bravia 40in Model S2188FS40" so backend systems don't have to change. Even if your used numbers in your URLs like: you can use mapfiles in Mod_Rewrite to map the numbers to specific values and still have them equate to static URLs like: Mod_Rewrite is probably one of he most powerful tools in a webmaster/SEO's arsenol as well as the most underutilized.