Se friedly URLS...needed or not?

for ecommerce.. what do you think?

[martekbiz]

Hey guys,

I have a client that we're developing an Ecommerce website for. The question right now is whether or not to re-write URLS to be more compatible with SE's.

Cost is a factor for the client as is development time.

it would be far more economical and take less time to develop the front-end with spiderable URLS but this is a site that will require as much SE traffic potential as possible.

Given the develop.. they are in a good position to dominate their market with customer service and an online system not seen before in their industry and one to boot that has been increasingly in demand.

What do you think? To re-write or not?

Aaron

[rogerd]

I would say "yes", rewrite the URLs, if they are in a competitive environment and expect the product listings to rank well in the SERPs. Google is definitely getting better at spidering dynamic URLs, but static URLs still seem to outrank equivalent dynamic URLs. Some SEs may not spider the dynamic URLs at all.

The spiderability of the dynamic URLs can also be a factor. A short, one-variable query string is better than a long one with 6 variables. And SessionIDs are killers.

[pageoneresults]

My suggestion is that all dynamic sites rewrite their URIs. It is a tedious process at first but, the end result is well worth it. Forget about the SEs for a minute and think about your visitors. Structure your URIs so they are short and easy to remember. Of course you will strategically name the paths appropriately. ;)

I've got a new policy now and that is any new client who comes on board in a dynamic environment, must incorporate a URI rewriting strategy. Working with an existing site is much more difficult than starting from scratch with a new site. With existing sites, you've got 301s and 404s to worry about. With new sites that is one less stressful event to deal with.

Now, let's talk about the SEs. I can tell you from personal experience that Google and the others react to clean URIs much differently than they do to dirty URIs. I've seen deeper crawling occur when the URIs are rewritten. Where the spider used to stop due to the number of variables or an id session, they now travel well beyond that due to the rewriting and elimination of all variables.

Do it now while you can. Don't wait until it is too late and you've got to deal with setting up a complex 301 structure to deal with the redirects from old to new. You'll thank yourself many times over for taking heed to this advice now and not later.

By the way, you will save hours and hours of development time if you do it now and not later. Depending on the knowledge level of the programmer will determine how quickly you can set up the rewrite rules in IIS or Apache.