Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Revisiting
Posted April 25, 2006 at 2:37 PM by Ben Nadel
I have been playing around with the Urls that I use internally to the site. Some links have been using search engine optimized links (like ./snippets/) and some use the DAX (Divide and Conquer, like "?dax=blog.search"). At first it seemed that Google was not indexing the dynamic DAX pages (while Jeeves, Yahoo, and other search engines where); however, in the past few weeks, I have noticed that, while not often, Google does in fact make it's way to parts of the dynamic sections.
So, should I keep using the nice Urls? They add overhead to the page processing time. They also potentially create a bottle neck in the site since they all go through the error handler. But then again, so do links with the "index.cfm?dax=" format. I do like the look of the nice links and they certainly make tracking web stats much easier as they are unique pages instead of unique query params to the index file.
For now, I will keep them. But I am still building out the site. Who knows where I will optimize going forward.
Reader Comments
Not true, it is possible in various circumtsances....
They all index regular application pages with ? etc. But it is much easier for crawlers to index SEF URLs.
Thanks
Just check my name's link... Completely dynamic. Google now reads many types of links including those which contain spaces and national encoding characters.
I was thinking about rewriting urls for seo purpose but I realised that it is not worth it. What exists and works well, shouldn't be touched in my opinion. I achieved very good rankings for my site with dynamic URLs and without keywords within the URL.
On the other hand it caused me few problems thanks to lack of knowledge in the beginning. If you replace two variables and their values, the browser will give you the same content in both cases, however Google considers them to be 2 different URLs... Fortunately, I fixed it few weeks ago :) .
@Jan,
Glad that the dynamic URLs are working for you. I have not dealt too much the pros / cons, but I have heard that dynamic URLs are not ranked as well. Good that it works for you, though :)
It is seen that dynamic URL are not search engine friendly and there may be problem with regular crawling of site..
Google do crawl both the links but if from SEO perspective you want to rank your page for that particular keyword so its better using the keyword in URL that's why these nicely named website get ranked well instead of the dynamic one. Dynamic one also do rank but according to there content and traffic.It's preferable using keywords for the URL as they will help you for SERP.
