how bad is it to have most your sites urls with a ? in? eg mysite.com/keyword/?id=12 as opposed to mysite.com/keyword/something.php I know google dont really index sites with more than 3 &'s, but a single '?' ? most of the threads i read here states that it is bad, but just how bad? also, is there a simple way to get around this (with php, eg by using mod_rewrite?) thanks
Not that bas as long as you refrain from passing session IDs in the URL (most other SE's choke on it). By the way, whenever there's a & there is always a ? as well. (At least in the languages I know.)
the session ID is added automatically is it not? how can you stop it from appearing? I never explicitly add it to the url, but it can still appear I think.
You would have to be adding the session ID in the script.. it does not automatically appear. Maybe I don't understand what you're talking about. using mod_rewrite to make all the url's appear static (end in .html) is a great idea.. google at least will crawl and index your site much deeper and faster with static-looking pages. Eric
well I dont really understand how it all works, but here is my situation. I write my site in php, and uses $_Session variables etc, but I never intentionaly add the session id to any links. Some pages are static however, so i use fopen('bla.php') to save it as a html page, but then when I look at the links in the html, they end with $sessonid=.
when using a mod_rewrite which is better for SE, urls ending in a / or urls just hanging EX: http://www.domain.com/view/368 or: http://www.domain.com/view/368/ anything?
i really don't think the ? makes a difference anymore... a link is a link as far as the bots are concerned. I haven't really noticed any difference after trying both methods
I noticed a massive differnce. I had a site where about 95% of the links had ? in them. Google came through and only had about 3 pages indexed at the apex. Then it seemed to dump all of the pages from the index. I moved the site to its permanent domain (a new address) a couple days ago with a mod_rewrite setup. It spidered 103 pages the first day. It has 66 pages indexed today (about 2 days later), and googlebot has come back every day to get more fun.
You can use this : ini_set('session.use_trans_sid', false); in your php files to stop using id sessions being put to your url's. read this thread for more detailed info. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=11763