Hey guys, im really terrible at SEO(ive never even seen any of my pages in search engine results before, even if i type the exact title, or meta tags or anything like that), but im working on a new site which will hopefully do pretty well. The site is database driven, and all the information on the site(over 300,000 pieces of info) database entries can be accessed from the website using a page like search.php?fruit=apple&color=red. Can search engines index these pages, or would it be better to make a script that generates an html version of the database entries, so when someone goes to it, instead of going to search.php?fruit=apple&color=red, it would go to apple-red.html? Thanks, let me know if you need more info. Matthew.
Hello Matthew, 1) yes, Search engines do index these kinda pages with strings attached, if you want to get rid of these pages simply use .htaccess file and commands to make the URL seo Friendly 2) before you are searching your site in SE's make sure your site is listed which you can check with this command site:www.yourdomain.com Thanx
Search engines can have problems indexing query strings From Google webmaster guidelines, If you can use mod rewrite (apache server), not .htaccess (that's for restricting bot access to files) to generate static html pages which should work fine.
It's not too difficult, if you're using an off the shelf CMS then there's probably already a custom one available, if not take a look here - http://www.doriat.com/ there are probably lots of good tutorials if you google it also.
Of course your right about static pages, but these can be done via .htaccess (consider shared hosting environment). WRT using query strings, I believe that Google wont index anything that resembles session ids (e.g. id=), not simply any query string. Query strings can be used (and will be indexed) but your are advised not to use values that could be mistaken for a SID. As you say, static URLs are best however.
Great topic, Ive been wondering about this myself. Question: Is &id just an example of what not to use, or do they literally mean not to use id in the querystring...?
'Most' of the time search engines are okay with query strings (id=), any more than two or three in a URL will probably cause problems, and in my experience it's just not worth taking the risk. A site that uses mod rewrite for me at least is a lot cleaner and easier to work with. Another point on query strings is they can often lead to duplicate content issues as the same content can often be seen at more than one URL. PHP - http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/mod/mod_rewrite.html ASP - http://www.asp101.com/articles/wayne/extendingnames/
thanks for all the replies guys. i run the site on my own server at my house, so i dont think it came with mod_rewrite. does it make a difference to search engines if the url is converted like that, or if the pages are actually static html pages(can they tell the difference?) thanks again guys.
static pages are much more easy for SE's to crawl and much faster, SE's love static, Dynamic page can still used but not same credits as html.
Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index... IMHO, "&id=" doesn´t equal to "&identification=", or does it?
anyone have any url's to some good mod_rewrite tutorials(other then obviously the apache site). Thanks guys Matthew
(-: OK, Matt, I know id is a parameter, but Google states to have problems with this specific parameter called "id" only. Not with any parameter, that means it can deal quite well with parameters like "&product=", "&identification=", "&this=", "&that="... Do you understand what I mean?