Making friendly URLs

mod_rewrite to make urls search engine friendly

[Yosha]

I am currently using mod_rewrite to make my urls search engine friendly for my ecommerce site. I am trying to eliminate all .cgi, =, & out of the url. However some of them are getting out of hand with blank areas where variables are not filled in.
http*//example.com/prod/123//n/abc////Y//def

These variables would be filled in during a normal shopping experience so I have to keep them around. Now my question, is this going to cause a problem with having my site crawled? The link above would be similar to a link to one of my products. I haven't found any information about the affects of having two slashes next to each other. Would it help if I converted the slashes to commas? Please help!

[Boxie]

you can use cookies to store user information

and you can rethink the number of variables you need to pass around...

/category/product_id/

should be enough for you to get a product out of your database

[Yosha]

That's a good idea except if people turn off their cookies. Some of the information that is in the variables that I would have to place in a cookie is needed for processing at checkout time. Maybe there is another way that I can right the URL without slashes and still be search engine friendly.