Long urls - parameters and the search engines

Why engines don't like urls with long parameters?

[kenjack]

I understand that search engines do not like urls with many parameters but I don't know why. Or maybe it's that they don't like long urls and obviously the more parameters the longer the url. But that leads me to the related question - why don't they like long urls or urls with many parameters (more than 2 or 3?).

I'm using a template site where the inside pages are dynamic. I can't get them on google but when I pay the inktomi subscription I get them on msn and the inktomi engines.

I really appreciate the thoughtful answers you folks provide and hopefully someday I will be able to provide insights myself. Cheers, Ken

[Rosalind]

I understand that search engines do not like urls with many parameters but I don't know why. Or maybe it's that they don't like long urls and obviously the more parameters the longer the url. But that leads me to the related question - why don't they like long urls or urls with many parameters (more than 2 or 3?).

It probably has something to do with the fact that these urls look like search results, and they don't want to list too much of the competition. It also cuts down on listing page after page of relatively similar results.

On Google, PR may play a part in the number of dynamic pages that are spidered. I have pages with three parameters that have recently started being crawled, with no changes on my part. I'm assuming it's because the PR on that domain has gone up.

[kenjack]

Thanks Rosalind. But I thought PR was a page by page thing so that a better PR for say your home page would not I assume influence an inside page getting crawled. But it's good to hear some of your dynamic pages are getting crawled. Ken

[john_k]

There is no way for the indexing logic to know what the parameters mean. The risk of following every url with different parameters is that the parameters often don't have anything to do with the content and they will continually re-index the same page.

Google will attempt to index urls where only the querystring chages, but they could not do so without having some type of duplicate/repeating content detection or threshold. I doubt that the number of parameters has anything to do with it. When the same page url with different parameter strings stops returning unique content, they would stop paying attention to the querystring for that particualar page.

[thaedge]

kenjack what do your URL strings look like?

Do they look like this:

mywidget.com/index.html?id=5&category=4&sessionid=111111

If they do your best bet is to make them crawler friendly by using some work arounds. I personally do it with php and Coldfusion. The url string would in the end look like this:

mywidget.com/index.html/id/5/category/4/

Maybe this will help you get crawled. My one site has some 9000-11000 pages using this method in Google.