Bad Google SEO? (changing to static looking urls)

[fhugh]

I just noticed a competitor has made some efforts to try to SEO up their website.

What they've done is create static looking links that redirect to dynamic ones i.e.

http://www.example.com/importantkeywords

when clicked on goes to

http://www.example.com/do-search?Search=important+keywords&category=0

or similar.

When I search in google for the 'important keywords', Google ranks the static looking url very highly - #1 for some terms, and shows the static looking url, not the one the static url redirects to.

How are they doing this, and is this bad seo?

[edited by: tedster at 5:47 pm (utc) on May 31, 2008]
[edit reason] switch to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]

[tedster]

The basic idea of creating "friendly urls" is a good idea. How you do it technically depends on your server technology - commonly Apache (here's a reference thread [webmasterworld.com]) or IIS (usually with the use of a third party program on the server, such as ISAPI Rewrite.)

In your example, if the url with the query string actually gets displayed in the browser, that is a buggy implementation of a url rewriting scheme - possibly using a redirect rather than a rewrite rule. That situation can create more than one url that resolves to the same content. Although Google is getting really good at sorting this out at a low level of occurrence, it still can cause indexing and ranking problems.

If other kinds of duplicate urls are possible, that compounds the risk. For instance, if you can switch the parts of the query string to ?category=0&Search=important+keywords and still get the same content, that is another technical flaw and it can result in a third variation of the url mixing things up.

If there are canonical variations of the url that also resolve (such as with-www and without-www, or http and https) then you can quickly multiply the number of urls that resolve to the same content by a major factor. If Google's index gets flooded with multiples, the potential for problems over time gets worse.

[jdMorgan]

If you can see the dynamic URL in your browser address bar, then the competitor is using an external redirect -- And that's really good news for you, because it means that their code implementation is faulty, and their rank is probably not as good as it could be.

The correct implementation is to internally rewrite static-looking URLs to the dynamic filepaths needed to invoke the script(s). This takes place inside the server, within the context of the current HTTP transaction, and does not 'expose' the dynamic URL to users or search engines.

Jim

[trakkerguy]

and is this bad seo?

Not sure what exactly the OP meant by this. If it works, why would it be bad. Perhaps his question is (like mine):
does Google frown upon, or possibly penalize for this?

If it is done to manipulate the serps, it is against their policy. But sounds like it could be a gray area?

[g1smd]

*** Why would this be bad? ***

Every link you click on, does not directly deliver you to the content.

Instead you hit a redirect every time.

The URL that will be indexed is the final URL in the redirect, not the URL in the link.

It's all a bit shady, and I can't see the internal links passing all of their internal PR in this scheme.

Additionally, external sites are going to be linking to the long, dynamic URLs and not to the shorter "folder-based" (static-looking) URLs.

It's a bad implementation.

[tedster]

There's nothing gray about rewriting query string urls so they are more friendly both for human visitors and for search engines. It's extremely common and even recommended.Widely used platforms for content management today either rewrite the urls by default or have plug-in modules that will do it.

There's a big difference between sending clear signals about your page to Google and trying to manipulate the SERPs. If every step that helps a page rank well was a manipulation, then you wouldn't even use keywords in your page titles.

You can hear Google's Matt Cutts recommend url rewriting in this video: Static vs. Dynamic urls [video.google.com].

And beyond this, while keywords in the filepath are one signal that Google does look at, the weight given by the algo to any keywords in the filepath varies all the time. It takes a lot more than that to get a #1 ranking for any query that's at all competitive,

[g1smd]

Sure, there's nothing grey about a rewrite, but this is a redirect.

In this case, I am not sure whether it is a botched implementation or an attempt to be 'clever'.

Either way, I think it is probably hurting rather than helping.

[trakkerguy]

Yes, I also was not concerned with using rewrites, but rather the reason for the link.

I thought the OP was implying his competitor was linking out to top ranking sites, strictly for SEO purposes. And the method was to use a dynamic search for those top ranking sites, yet use the rewrite so he could have proper seo anchor text.

I've seen something like this, where it is all done for seo purposes - to manipulate serps - and not for the visitor. If that is the case, what would google think of this?

In the case I'm speaking of, the links are not highlighted as links. They are CSS formatted to appear as normal text( no underline or bold) ? I've considered reporting this site, but am not sure if it's really spam or not.

[tedster]

I was pretty sure the opening post was about internal linking, since there's a mention of high rankings for the static url. I'd say using your server to rewrite the url for an EXTERNAL link is a spam attempt - though probably quite wimpy in its effect unless the url is also used as the anchor text,

[g1smd]

Yes, it is all about internal linking. The onsite links show static URLs, and clicking them redirects to the dynamic URL.

The fact that the "static" URL ranks at all, points me to believe that the redirect is a 302 redirect.

External sites are going to be linking to the URL they see in their browser address bar -- the dynamic one.

It all begins to stack up as an accident waiting to happen.