How Many Variables in URL For Google

[bhartzer]

I have quite a few pages/URLs that have a lot of variables in them. The URLs look like this:

domain.com/page.asp?var1=0&var1=1&var2=2

How many variables in the URL will Google accept now? If I have 10 variables in the URL can I get that page indexed if it's a unique page? Or do I need to make it less than three?

[Nikke]

Google accepts as many variables as you can feed them, but if you want to make it easier for Google to sort them out, and thereby spider and index your site... try to keep them to a minimum.

I try to use only one, and I also always strive to keep the length of that variable at maximum 5 digits.

(I insist on naming my one variable ID [as in index.php?ID=1754] which is said to be bad. I haven't noticed that, but I'm keeping them under 5 digits as a precauton to not confuse Google to believe that my ID vars are session IDs.)

[Rosalind]

I think it depends on your PR, or at least that's my experience. A higher PR page may be spidered in spite of having lots of variables, whereas a low PR page would be skipped.

[rainborick]

The guidelines say "It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few." I seem to recall that GG once recommended no more than 3. I doubt that the number of parameters was ever the issue. I bet they have traditionally preferred shorter URLs overall just for the data storage implications. But they index gargantuan URLs from DMOZ, Yahoo!'s Directory, eBay, and Amazon without a hiccup, so I suspect that URLs with query strings aren't a problem for any of the big three at all anymore as long as the data is served in a recognizeable format.

[tedster]

One thing I have noticed -- when developers use many variables in the query string, they often accidentally begin creating more than one url that accesses the same content.

[g1smd]

I see that sort of thing in most of the forum and shopping cart software out there at the moment. No attention to SEO detail at all by the authors (vbulletin and osCommerce are especially bad).