KenB - 8:28 pm on Jan 2, 2010 (gmt 0)

This is a really old part of my site. Basically it is using some rewrite rules to convert the URL into a query string. For instance behind the scenes, http://example.com/foo/widgets%3A%20blue.html is handled as http://example.com/index.html?foo=widgets%3A%20blue

It is actually a chemical database, with each chemical name being the "filename". This lead to some really messed up file names, but like I said this section of my website is almost ten years old so there is a limit to what I can do to fix things without taking some serious SERP hits.

Remember way back when I added this section of my site, query strings weren't treated as nicely by search engines as were "real" web pages so it was important to rewrite queries into the main URI. Even today there is debate whether one should rewrite queries into the main URI.