SE friendly links question?

Hi everyone:

I've been considering how to make my site more SE friendly and the question of links has come up. My site creates much content dynamically using PHP to pull from a database. I want to use mod_rewrite to help make my links more SE friendly and a question comes to mind based on what I'm reading on the net. I was hoping someone could help me understand the correct form of a link to use to be more SE friendly.

Currently my site creates links that look like below which includes the category query string:

<A HREF="viewrecipes.php?category=Barbecue" class="body">Barbecue Recipes</A>

Should I use mod_rewrite to dynamically translate the link above to look something like this :

<A HREF="viewrecipesBarbecue.htm" class="body">Barbecue Recipes</A>

OR

Should I do the opposite and create the original link to be a derived link (nonexistent)that looks like this:

<A HREF="viewrecipesBarbecue.htm" class="body">Barbecue Recipes</A>

And have mod_rewrite change it back dynamically to the original state of:

<A HREF="viewrecipes.php?category=Barbecue" class="body">Barbecue Recipes</A>

The entire question I suppose is will most search engines even attempt to follow a link that contains a query string like ?category=xxx

thanks,
Mike

 

Most (important) search engines should not have a problem following

A HREF="viewrecipes.php?category=Barbecue" class="body">Barbecue Recipes</A>

Code (markup):

 

Hi Minstrel,

Thanks for the reply. Now that you mentioned it I did some random searches on Google / Yahoo / AOL and found links like mine are indexed. Now I'm wondering if I need to do the mod_rewrite thing at all. More investigation is called for I suppose.

thanks,
Mike

 

I don't think it's necessary. I know that you'll find contradictory opinions but in my opinion that is based on SE capabilities from a few years ago. Like everyhting else on the net, spiders have evolved and improved and the kinds of URLs you're describing should present no challenges at all to modern spiders.

 

If you don't use Session ID there is no problem, altough it might be better for the visitors to remember/bookmark URLs.

Quote from GoogleGuy written on June 2, 2005:

URL: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/29720.htm (message number 3)

 

Also this:

Google Facts & Fiction

Google and Dynamic Pages

 

This is not correct from Google and I think that line should be removed from the guidelines. It has only to do with session IDs.

Try this query "inurl:id=2" and you get 1 070 000 hits.