Forum Moderators: phranque
I wondering which one to use for a mod_rewrite...
Should i go for articles/some_article/ or is it better to have articles/some_artcile.html?
Does a search engine have a prefernce or treat them both the same?
Also, it seems at present that they all work on my server. <snip>
Basically my question is - should my links to this article (and others) be in the folder or to the file?
Thanks for opinion - even if it is to say that it really doesnt matter!
Actually, another one, would calling my folder or file a relevant name help? At present i have /articles/140.html - would it help my rankings if i changed that to /articles/ZEN_AND_THE_ART_OF_LOSING.html?
Cheers,
dan
[edited by: jdMorgan at 2:39 pm (utc) on Mar. 22, 2005]
[edit reason] Removed specifics per TOS. [/edit]
Welcome to WebmasterWorld!
This is really an SEO question and not specific to Apache.
Generally the search engines don't care what you call your pages, as long as you don't append session IDs or many query paramters to it. The W3C has come out in favor of eliminating filetype extensions from URLs, in order to simplify URLs for users. Doing so also makes it much easier to hide the underlying technology of your site; For example, you can avoid losing your page rankings when you change from .html to .php if the .html filetypes were never included in the URLs in the first place.
> Actually, another one, would calling my folder or file a relevant name help? At present i have /articles/140.html - would it help my rankings if i changed that to /articles/ZEN_AND_THE_ART_OF_LOSING.html?
To what purpose? If you want to get "credit" for the keywords in your URL, then use "/articles/zen-and-the-art-of-losing" -- Note hyphens, lowercase, and no file extension. Hyphens are recognized as word boundaries, while underscores are not. Lowercase to aid in direct type-ins. No file extension because no-one cares and it's not needed. That URL is still too long, though, so you might consider dumping the stop words and just using "/article/zen-art-losing".
In general, the shorter, the more easy-to-remember, and the more-easy-to-type the URL is, the better. Adjust the weighting of these factors to suit your site type and user demographics.
If you have another purpose in mind for using a descriptive URL, then that may be worth discussing, too.
Jim
Is "/articles/zen-and-the-art-of-losing" the optimum way to link to that article and will give best search engine results? My desire for descriptive urls was purely for search engines and not users. Think i will try it out for some and see how it goes.
Thanks again for your help, much appreciated.
