Question mark after the slash

Does Google index URLs with query string and no file name?

[marek]

Hello all,

The most important pages of our site are not listed in Google at all and I can't figgure out why. Could it be because their URLs in all links looks like this:

/ct/?id=161

Actually, many pages of the site, that have longer URL and more params in the query string, are listed, but their URLs always contain a file name, e.g.:

/xy/abc.php?id=111

Thanks for any advice.

[Brett_Tabke]

That is an interesting tidbit, I too wish we knew the answer for - anyone? I can't see a tech reason for Google not to index it, but there just might be.

[marek]

Thanks, Brett. I can't see any tech reason either, but on the home page of that web site there are about 20 links - five of them have "normal" URL (only directory ending with the slash) and all of them are indexed as well as about 500 pages with quite a long URLs that are linked from those five. On the other hand, none of those "/ct/?id" URLs are indexed, nore the pages they are linked from them.

Has anyone ever seen such URL like

[xyz.xy...]

in Google search results?

Thanks a lot for your input.

[iamjoe]

I dont believe google does spider those kind of pages.

I had a site which was completely driven from a single url/file and google didnt like that at all. It was only when i started putting in straight links to my products that google started to crawl my website.

Best I can do is suggest you create static pages of all your content and have a sitemap which links to each product.

[werty]

Now i am completely confused.

do you think a url like this would get indexed?
domain.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=7&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

I thought i read that google does crawl pages like this, but now i am not too sure.

[Flippi]

Well I don't think the 'question mark after the slash' is the only reason far bad (or not) ranking. Entries in the form of 'www.xyz.com/?page.htm' are in good positions in the SERPs.

The reason for bad rankings can be caused by the extension of the complet url. I suggest the combination of 'question mark after slash' and 'not known url extension' could be the reason for non inclusion.

[ciml]

The 'not known url extension' confuses me (i.e. why do Google care?). Are there any /whatever/?whatever-but-no-slash URLs in Google?

Although Google are crawling URLs with "?"s much more than before, having a "?" in the URL does give a higher barrier to getting crawled.

[semick]

I am no expert, but I have taken ASP web sites and reduced the number of parameters in the url [either by changing to POST instead of GET, or putting the information in cookies], or used a product like XQASP. I believe for Apache there is Mod Rewrite which can be used to accompish the same thing for free. The goal is to make the URL look static. But in doing this you may want to make sure you don't create circuitous paths for a spider to follow endlessly as well...

Scott