I have made a few posts on this and suddenly think that maybe my ideas are not quite right..... I thought that a URL of page.php3?keyword=64 was better than page.php3?id=64 and that if you could get page.php3?keyword=anotherkeyword then this was even better. I have not had a problem getting dynamic URL's indexed so never thought mod rewrite was neccessary. My dinghy database is optimised and has pages for all type of boat eg http://www.noblemarine.co.uk/dinghydatabase.php3?dinghy=Wanderer Previously I thought that having the boat type of "Wanderer" in the URL would be better than just using its id from the database but now I'm not so sure. If you look at the google results you can see that dinghy is highlighted so I was probably correct to use page.php3?dinghy=... rather than page.php3?id=... http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=Wanderer+class+dinghy&meta= but the word "Wanderer" is not highlighted so I am assuming that google is not picking this up as part of the URL - is this correct? If I used a url like dinghydatabase/Wanderer then google would have picked up the "Wanderer" keyword in the URL. Any comments on this????
the highlighting feature does not show which keywords Google is noticing and using for rankings.. it just highlights any instance of the keyword(s) you searched for that exist within the SERP's.
Yes, but I would have expected it to highlight the word "Wanderer" when you search for it??? http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=Wanderer+class+dinghy&meta=
it's highlighted when i'm looking at it.. if you have to google toolbar, turn the highlight option and it should be highlighted (if that's not already what you are doing). either way, i wouldn't give it much thought one way or the other.
Actually, the best thing you can do with mod rewrite is remove the ? (question marks) from the URLs. Google doesn't index pages with ? (question marks), as well as it does URLs without. This is because pages with ? (question marks) are dynamic and dynamic content is not really indicative of authority.
The pages have been indexed (thousands of them) with no problems, my question is why the word "Wanderer" is not shown in bold for my site (noblemarine.co.uk) in the search for http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=Wanderer+class+dinghy&meta= and does the fact it is not in bold mean there is a good case for using mod rewrite.
I don't think it's a good case for using mod_rewrite at all. As I think was pointed out earlier in this thread, the bolding simply highlights where Google finds the word or words in the search term on that page - it does not tell you that the highlighted sections are used in actually ranking the pages.