Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Background:
Four years ago my web developer installed a file into my OsCommerce shop that would convert product URLs from: product_info.php?products_id=nn to: product-nn.html and list them in a sitemap linked to my homepage. This was done to achieve better SE rankings. Within a month 100s of my individual product pages started to appear in the SEs and sales took off.
Over the years I’ve noticed that 90% of the URLs that appear in SEs were the .php version and NOT the .html. This seemed odd because the .php URLs produce a PR1 while the .html URLs produce a PR3. Weird?!
In June ’06 a well known company listed my website in a print publication and misprinted my domain name. I found the domain was available so I purchased it along with another that I thought was cool. I then pointed both new domain names to my existing website. But I did NOT do a 301 redirect because I didn’t know any better.
About 3 months later my site’s ranking plummeted in Google and I began to research why. I determined (but not 100% sure) that Duplicate Content was the culprit.
I modified my .htaccess with a 301 for both domains, including www and non-www, and waited until the next noticeable “update” in Google. Bummer! No change in my rankings
I’ve now been reexamining everything about my site to eliminate Duplicate Content.
So here’s my question, should I standardize on: product_info.php?products_id=nn or: product-nn.html?
Note: there are many incoming links from sites, blogs, articles, etc that point to the .php URL version.
Any insight would be appreciated as to what is going on, how long I’ll have to wait and what to do to regain my once stellar rankings in Google.
The average user will determine 99% of your usability if they can find what they want by perusing your website navigation... not "hacking" your url.
In my view, if you can find stuff by hacking a url that you can't by browsing the site, it reflects very poorly on the webmaker.
But none of this is relevant: Google will be happy either way, and it is more difficult to keep it organized rather than just htaccess the hell out of it.
SUGGESTED FORMAT: domain.com/product-type/nnn/product-name.html
Using a "movies" theme as an example, this is the format I’m leaning towards…
domain.com/store/horror-movies/666/title-of-movie.html
-Where "horror-movies" represents the category that OsC is currently representing by: "cPath=nn" (I will limit spidering to avoid dupe content, but will include in URL for keyword value)
-Where "666" represents the product ID that OsC is currently representing by: "_id-666" (and has zero keyword value)
Question:
Since when writing Page Titles the most important Keywords should appear first (reading left to right), should that same strategy be applied to keyword URLs? So, should I represent the "666" this way instead: "/title-of-movie-666.html"?
