Your page URL is one of the important factors that you must consider during your SEO process. This factor is not only a factor that has to do with rank for few keywords, this factor (URL) may disallow your page from being indexed by Google!
Search engines feel scary from query parameters since it is easy to get their crawlers stuck crawling few pages with just changing query parameter value dynamically. Google says that a URL that has more than three query parameters may not be indexed. They may index URLs with more query parameters but thats not often. Thus, in your site SEO, you have to avoid query parameters. If you are an online retailer and your product page URL looks like:
/products.php?id=12321&session_id=12121&page=3&name=freezer
You may need to consider restructure your site by rewriting your URLs. I will post later about URL rewriting using Mod_Rewrite. You may consider different URL structures that do not have query parameters like:
/products/Freezer/3
Are you wondering if that will really make difference? Believe me, it makes. Sites that uses query parameters a lot might not get indexed.
Finally, getting rid from query parameters and replacing them with keywords will have real impact on your keywords rank. Given a product, let us say, Microwave in your online retailing site with ID= 32, let us compare two simple URL structures:
1) /products?product_id=32
Versus
2) /products/Microwave
The second URL structure will improve your rank for keywords related to Microwave since search engines will not relate the ID “32″ to your site content.
To summarize, you really need to avoid query parameters. You should try to build keyword rich virtual URL structure for your site. Building a keyword rich URL is not going to be easy, i will write later how to build a router in php to help you to create virtual and keyword rich URLs.
June 11th, 2007 at 8:35 am
Thank you
Question: I have been doing some SEO trials for a website. I just noticed that yahoo is less considerate for link relevance than Google-especially that i read Google research paper-. Meta tags tended to substantially affect the rank on yahoo rather than Google. Is this true ?
Thanks Adi
June 11th, 2007 at 9:11 am
Thank you for coming by Adel.
Meta tags are not important at all for all search engines. You should have Meta description tag though. Meta tag keywords almost ignored by all SEs. I suggest that you need to have Meta tag description since it shows up in the snippet for your site in search engine result pages (SERPs).
Yes, you are right, all search engine do not pay a lot attention to link relevance except Google. Google is very strong in link analysis and detecting which link is related, or paid or from donation page or from comment page without “nofollow” tag than all other search engine. Yahoo and Live.com do not have that ability.
This is one of few reasons why Google rocks.
Thanks,
Adi Azar
June 11th, 2007 at 11:58 am
that’s a lot of information. Thanks tons
June 18th, 2007 at 12:20 am
and for yahoo and msn which elements are important?
And more thing: a few related keywords in the keyword tag won’t hurt your site
June 18th, 2007 at 8:41 am
Welcome John.
MSN or Live.com seems to me very similar to Google. I strongly believe that Microsoft does it best to reverse engine Google :). As such URL is very important for MSN.
Yahoo also pays attention to the URL. However, Yahoo tends to follow up URLs with many query parameters, which is something Google does not do.
For your site that, try to have a page with URL Orange-County-Used-Cars and talk about your site. Link this from your home page, and try to give it links from the outside world, and hopefully you will notice different in your sales
Good luck
September 14th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
What if on you example the link to /products?product_id=32 will have alt and title with the important keywords/description on them will that not be good enough ?
It think your side is pretty, pretty good!
September 14th, 2007 at 1:08 pm
Oh, what about a page that has a paginated list ?
E.g.
I have a page that present a lot of images. There is a pagination control so user can navigate to various pages. What’s the best approach for such pages ?
September 14th, 2007 at 2:53 pm
Well, one query parameter is fine.Focus on gaining relevant back links. And you always can rewrite these URLs using apache.
Pagination can be harmful if you have many pages, since you will give them little page rank and may never be indexed.
October 31st, 2007 at 1:39 pm
Hi,
I am trying to use SEO url in my site, but what happend when user fill a form with params, these information can’t be passed as SEO, it must be passed as query parameter, right?
Thanks..
Joaquin