Search Engine Friendly URL's

URL Rewriting

Ok, so can a line be drawn?

I followed the link you provided above and the original poster in that forum thread had the variable "ID" twice in his dynamic URL. From what I understand and unless I'm mistaken, Google throws out what it believes to be affiliate pages and that looks like an affiliate page URL.

I sort of have proof of the statement I just made because when the customized content management system I use for sites was written (it's still being written) it generated pages with URLs thusly:

hhtp://www.mysite.com/news_reader.php?id=1

For the longest time I couldn't figure out why content on my site was not making it onto SERPs when other sites with the exact same content were. So, I was told to look for the problem in the URL (ie: Did I use "id" as the incremental variable? ... YES!). He said to change that to something that wouldn't be associated with programs like MLM and other situations where hundreds of the exact same content exist, only with a different affiliate code in the URL.

So, I changed to value to "page" instead and with a day (or two), my articles were indexed right along with everybody else's. And my buddy got a well-deserved thank you.

But, I'm still left with this:

http://www.mysite.com/news_reader.php?page=1

I've read in places that I shoot the goat with SEs (Google, specifically) as soon as the "?" shows up in the URL. I've also read that it's even worse having an ampersand in the URL.

So, is my current URL format causing me to lose ranking?

a single parameter is nothing to worry about, when it's 3 or more then you can have problems.

I think there are other things there that are more likely to lose rankings

Quote: For the longest time I couldn't figure out why content on my site was not making it onto SERPs when other sites with the exact same content were

Exact same content is NOT what SEs want and duplicates will be filtered out.

Google actually has on their site

Quote: Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index.

from http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html

Google wrote: If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.

Google's guidelines with regards to dynamic URLs is rather dubious.

Quote: be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages

Is Google referring to their own spiders or not? Or are they giving us a little friendly advice on how to ensure indexing by lesser SEs?

While I am contempating the presense of a "?" in my database driven pages, perhaps I should go have a look at Mod Rewrite. But without access to the servers, is it something I can implement or is it up to the server admin?

Do you know if your host has rewrite on?

you can always force it on anyways, in notepad or similar add the following

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^news-reader([0-9]*).php news-reader.php?page=$1 [L]

save as .htaccess
which will convert mysite.com/news_reader.php?page=1 to mysite.com/news_reader1.php you can even loose the .php if you wish.

if you want to force no file extension, add

ForceType application/x-httpd-php

Note windows doesnt like saving files without a name so will need a text editor to name it

Hi busy!
I want to change my database links into .html links, I read on net about .htaccess file that we can change our database link into simple statis links useing rewirte engine commands. please sort out my problem my links shows as www.efaisalabad.com/cat_sell.php?cid=27

in .htaccess file i use this method
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^cat_sell(0-9).html$ cat_sell.php?cid=$1

but its is not working please check and give me solution

I am waiting your quick responce

mianriz

Why bother for a single parameter? SE have no problems with up to 3 parameters and sometimes more if the site is deemed as important.

are you trying to get cat_sell27.html ?
If cid is always going to be a number, just use ([0-9]*)

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^cat_sell([0-9]*).html$ cat_sell.php?cid=$1

if you want to use a dot ot dash, just add it before the first bracket.
if cid can be a name (letters), just add [a-z] after the [0-9]

This question was answered in your other thread, please refrain from spamming the threads with the same question, the other threads have been removed