Do Mod_rewrite or not?

[MoveyourwebSEO]

Ok, guys. Need help.
I'm going to start SEO campaign on a site that has quiry id strings. The domain is relatively old and the main page has pr4. Other pages also have PR...
So, for example, it looks like that: www.example.com/product.php?b=242#243 - PR2.
Then, there is one more thing: the site will sell a little bit different widgets and it will be completely redesigned...

The question is: do I need to implement mod_rewrite or leave all these as it is now?

Any suggestions are welcomed :-)

[edited by: tedster at 8:16 pm (utc) on Oct. 7, 2005]
[edit reason] use example.com [/edit]

[tedster]

Just one man's opinion here, but informed by a good number of anecdotes from various directions. Something about the query string, even a simple one, seems to slow down the indexing of a site. A spider needs to take care around a question mark, you knw?

Since you're redoing it anyway, I would go with rewriting the urls.

[bears5122]

Make sure you 301 those old query strings to the new ones.

[MoveyourwebSEO]

Ok, you suggest doing a 301 redirect.. But! I will have much more pages then just now, when the site has an old design and there will be related stuff, not necessarily the same as it is now. Still, what is better: to do Mod-rewrite and to loose PR4 or redirect(301) all the pages to the new ones considering that there will be many other pages as well?

[2by4]

Correctly implemented modrewrites + 301s should result in almost no drop off. Errors anywhere could cause big issues.

Every old url should be 301ed to the new search engine friendly ones. And the rewrite rules should simply extend to the new url scheme you choose, it should just be automatic.

Make absoluty certain that the person who is doing the rewrite rules knows what they are doing, I've been seeing some very serious errors in the last few months that have resulted in large dropoffs on the sites, and they are partly traceable to bad rewrite rules in the past, for example using 302 instead of 301s and so on.

I've seen even a single query string variable page suffer from duplicate content type issues, bad indexing, and PR 0 for all the query string pages. Modrewrite to unique urls not only solved all these issues, but gave the site a needed boost, since now when I add pages to that modrewrite section, they are spidered instantly, and are giving the overall site a boost.

I do not use query string urls anymore, for any reason, unless it's in a private login part of the site that won't be spidered.

[tenerifejim]

Did the mod_rewrite 301 thing in January. No worries. Better rankings (for several reasons), no ill effects (but no guarantees either).