Forum Moderators: phranque
I am currently redeveloping a site. currently its pages are named like this www.sitename.com/computers.php
but the new software I use names the pages
www.sitename.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=9
I raised the question on a forum if people would worry about the url when searching in google for computers if the site description gave them the info they wanted
ie:
Site Name
UK Computer Shopping - Computer store, software & accessories
www.sitename.com/modules.php?name=C...showpage&pid=10
or
Site Name
UK Computer Shopping - Computer store, software & accessories
www.sitename.com/computers.php
what would you pick? would it make any difference.
The question was answered by someone saying that my site would possibly be penalised for having a long url, and the page may not get spidered. I do not think this is correct, as I have seen longer urls in google - does anyone else have any thoughts on this that may help me decide what redevelopment route to take?
I have been developing for about a year and have around 60 sites - but this answer has baffled me.
Thankyou for your comments in advance
Lea
The question was answered by someone saying that my site would possibly be penalised for having a long url, and the page may not get spidered. I do not think this is correct.
That was actually some very good advice - if you have the choice between having an entire site based around parameter-based URLs and URLs which look static but are actually dynamic I think virtually everyone will tell you to go with the simple URL every single time. Why?
You'll never regret moving away from overly dynamic URLs, you get to have all the benefits of data-driven content but you get to put a nice URL over the top of it which gives more than a few benefits.
Most engines will crawl URLs which use multiple querystring parameters but there are no absolute rules that cover all engines so what might be crawled by one engine might not be crawled by another, so you might find that a portion of your site remains uncrawled by one engine because the querystring for those pages just happens to go over the limits it tolerates.
To quote GoogleGuy [webmasterworld.com] from a while ago;
General rule of thumb is that Googlebot is willing to ingest just about anything. The corollary is to keep the number of parameters small and to keep those parameters short (no session IDs, for example).
Engines are always getting better at parsing querystring-based pages, but at the end of the day I feel that a method that will work with every engine is preferred to a method that might work with every engine - especially if you are relying on SERPs to provide you with traffic.
As for the "longer URL" / "more querystring" point, there are some people that suggest the "cut off" point for the number of parameters you can pass via the querystring and still get crawled increases with site rank/size - the same has also been said for depth of recursive crawl within obviously dynamic pages.
(By dynamic I'm not talking about extension "php"/"asp" vs. "htm" I'm talking about querystrings etc - places where the parameters are obviously exposed.)
Looking at human factors for a moment;
Keyword in the URL is/was a reasonably useful optimisation depending on which engine you were looking at, but it's also a useful human factor because nearly every results page shows the URL for the result - you may be able to use this to reinforce the topic of the page and make the person looking at the results a little more confident that your result is relevant to their search just by having a "readable" url.
Also heavily dynamic URLs aren't as easy to read out over the phone or to pass along via viral marketing (printed media & word of mouth) and have a tendancy to be easier to break when they are being copied & pasted badly. This is more of a long-term issue but if you want natural inbound links it's always best to make it as easy for as possible for people to link to you.
- Tony
Lea
