Presenting rewritten URL's

Advice sought on the best way to present rewritten URL's

[Newkid]

Hi There,

First, thanks to webmaster world for a fantastic forum. Hopefully I can contribute as well as ask for help... First though I'm looking for a spot of advice. I've recently implemented a solution that rewrites URL's on an e-commerce store from

www.somestore.com/catalogue.asp?product=widgets&colour=blue

to

www.somestore.com/product/widget/colour/blue.html

You get the idea.

The question is now I've got a method for making a highly dynamic site indexable whats the best way to implement it? The site is enterprise scale, so changing everything would imply a mountain of work given the need for testing etc.

I was thinking that a sitemap containing rewritten links to all the product pages was the way to go, but am concerned that a page containing thousands of links would be penalised / not followed. Should I rig up a Yahoo! style directory structure instead?

All help appreciated

Best

Newkid

[taxpod]

I think a category subindex approach would work best. This way you get the PR pass through to the natural categories in the site and avoid having a page with thousands of links. It's not that a page with thousands of links would get penalized. I don't know if it would but if you've got widget type 1 - 10 in colors red, green, blue, yellow, orange, for example, why have one page with 50 links when you could easily have 10 pages with 5 links apiece. The last thing you want is to have your site map page come up in the serps and send people to a 100K page with a thousand text links on it!

I'm thinking that you want to get each of your thousands of product pages in the serps but you'll probably have very low PR on each of these pages. Why not go with category pages with higher PR as your main targets?

If you go

home (PR6) site map (PR5) and each of thousands of pages (PR4),

I would think you'd improve by going

home (PR6); 10 category subindex (PR5)

And how do you change .asp? pages to regular old URLs?

[Newkid]

Thanks Taxpod, that looks like useful advice. We're recoding the URL's via an ISAPI rewrite tool. It does pretty much the same job as the mod_rewrite function on Apache webservers, but on a MS platform.

To avoid hyping products if you want product names / url's drop me a line offlist.

Newkid

[Torben Lundsgaard]

Welcome to wmw Newkid

It seems to me like you are about to make a lot of duplicate pages.

If Google finds both URL's it will treat them as duplicate pages. I recommend that you implement the new link structure all over the site.

[ciml]

Welcome, Newkid. (Make sure to check out paynt's welcome post [webmasterworld.com])

I agree with Torben. If your software doesn't allow you to make a robot friendly site due to session Ids or whatever, then you may wish to make the full static site for the content and link to a /robots.txt protected area for the aspects that need strange URLs.

[Newkid]

Thanks Ciml / Torben, thats more good stuff to think about.

I'm not convinced duplicate pages will be a problem since the current problem is that Google hasn't found the existing pages at all. A search for

site: www.someurl.com *

Returns only 5 pages out of 1000+. I was hoping that by building a link structure to the rest of the site the 1000+ pages could get themselves into the index.

If google is delivered the same content under two distinct URL's ie.

www.somesite.com/product/widget/color/blue and www.somesite.som/product.asp?product=widget&color=blue

or

www.domain.com/page.html and
www.domain2.com/page.html

Will it penalise the site, or simply disregard one set of pages? If its the latter I don't really mind since the primary goal of simply getting into the index will have been achieved.

Best

Newkid