Search Engine Friendly URL’s explained
I had a post the other day about how to make search engine friendly URL’s using coldFusion. I had a comment that asked “Is it still necessary to remove the “?” and other symbols from CF code so search engines can read them?” Instead of answering with a comment I thought I would create a post about it. The simple answer is no. Google and the other top search engines have figured out how to do deal with dynamic URL’s. There are many sites that rank well using them. Having a “?” or “&” in your URL is not considered a negative or a positive by the search engine algos. What they do have a problem with is session ID’s. Do not use those.
At the same time having “?” and “&” in your URL can affect your ability to rank for keywords. Not because of the ranking algo but because of how it affects other factors. The first factor is that a messy long URL is less likely to get somebody to link to it. The second factor is if you ever decide to change your server side language you might want to change your URL’s. You don’t have to do this but a lot of people feel like they have to change the URL suffix.
It is best to try to keep your url’s as short as possible. This may require a little more work but it will be worth it. Don’t put anything in the URL if it can be assumed. Like some people will put states.php?country=us&state=tx. I would change that to just /state/tx/ or just /tx. If you are doing something like index.php?category=11&subcat=pirates you could change that to use /11/pirates/ or just /pirates/. Of course be careful not to assume so much that it causes problems as you grow. Also if you have a site that most of the data is in the database there is no reason to create so many files. You can have a huge website with just one file or just a few if you do the URL’s correctly.
Technorati Tags: SEO, search engine optimization, search engine friendly urls, URL, dynamic url, coldfusion, asp, asp.net, php
About a year ago I launched a Notre Dame football site (www.ndlna.com) with seo friendly urls, using coldfusion. It was actually much easier than I first thought to implement, and having all the data stored in a database allows for easy updates and very few CF files as you stated above. It may have taken a little more development time up front, but I can’t imagine going it any other way going forward.
BTW, I like the design of this blog. A new design is just what I need for my site
Just had my nice long comment wiped when I entered the CAPTCHA wrongly, so might be worth looking at that one
I agree with this article and think that people who claim that query-string based URLs are ok for SEO are missing the point.
When you are presented with 10 search results for “taco recipes”, all other things being equal you will click on…
http://www.domain.com/recipes/tacos/
and not
http://www.domain.com/index.php?page_id=2354&cat_id=64
Hi,
Its a informative blog.until i read your post, i am unaware of ?” and “&” in our URL can affect our ability to rank for keywords. I had gone through the link,search engine friendly URL’s using coldFusion, which you had mentioned in your post.Great Script, It works wonderfully…Thanks for sharing with us!
Just came across this post, which is maybe a bit late but I was wondering why you don’t use a permalink structure with the category and the title of the post in your url’s ?
Is it because of the “to keep them short” advice you give here ?
Friendly greetings,
dave
Short is great, its a fact that google cuts off titles longer then 60 caracters
I like short url’s too. It’s also better to use short url’s because of focus on the keywords that do matter.