URL Structure

Is this going to be a problem?

[shah2003]

Hi,

I recently got my web company to remove "?' from my URL structure. They got back to me with the following structure and suggested that this will work for search engines:

http*//example.com/mydomain/cat__8Fview_area_Simple__20Design_id_3SDR7QAb_mv__5Fpc_90

Will this work with the 'id' present? Can it be improved and is this easy to do?

Thanks!

[edited by: pageoneresults at 2:43 am (utc) on July 27, 2004]
[edit reason] Examplified URI [/edit]

[goodroi]

That is a better alternative to including "?".

Another thing you should look at is hyphen vs. underscore. This has been debated for a long time. My example is to search Google and Yahoo for red-widget and then search for red_widget.

[pageoneresults]

http*//example.com/mydomain/cat__8Fview_area_Simple__20Design_id_3SDR7QAb_mv__5Fpc_90

They may say that will work for search engines, but it sure doesn't work for the visitor. Just hope that you don't have to read that URI to someone over the phone.

There have been many discussions here concerning hyphens vs. underscores. The general consensus is that hyphens are suggested.

You've got double underscores in the above. I would never allow a URI like that to be generated from a database. It breaks just about every usability standard there is.

It may get indexed by a few search engines but I doubt very seriously that the resulting page is going to perform the way it could if the URI were clean.