SEO (18) Search engine friendly URL

Search engine friendly URL

Many websites have dynamically generated content. Content is dynamically generated in most cases by passing parameters in the URL. The URL in case of a dynamic webpage resembles http://www.mysite.com/index.php?pageid=70. This URL will be indexed by a search engine. However, there is often more than one parameter attached to the URL like sort order, navigation setting. Hence different URLs end up pointing to the same webpage.

http://www.mysite.com/album/viewcat.php?pageid=70&orderby=hitsD (Hits Descending)

http://www.mysite.com/album/viewcat.php?pageid=70&orderby=hitsA (Hits Ascending)

http://www.mysite.com/album/viewcat.php?pageid=70&orderby=titleD (Title Descending)

http://www.mysite.com/album/viewcat.php?pageid=70&orderby=titleA (Title Ascending)

There is no way for the search engine to justify which parameter identifies a new page and which parameter is a setting that does not justify indexing the URL as a new page. Hence spiders have been programmed to detect and ignore dynamic pages. This can be resolved by making the URL search engine friendly by replacing the database characters (#&*!%) with equivalent search engine friendly terms or characters. The above four URLs can be made search engine friendly as follows:

http://www.mysite.com/album/viewcat.php/pageid.70/orderby.hitsD

http://www.mysite.com/album/viewcat.php/pageid.70/orderby.hitsA

http://www.mysite.com/album/viewcat.php/pageid.70/orderby.titleD

http://www.mysite.com/album/viewcat.php/pageid.70/orderby.titleA

The webpage is indexed since the spider is fooled into believing that since the URL does not contain a database character, it is not a dynamic webpage. This might be an intermediate solution adopted by search engine spiders until there is technique that will allow spiders to index dynamic web pages, since the problem of isolating unique pages from their clones is not resolved by generating search engine friendly URL. This type of conversion between dynamic URL to search engine friendly URL and vice-versa can be achieved on almost all types of servers either by proper configuration or installing third party software. One should communicate with their hosting service provider to know more about the software/server configuration available to generate search engine friendly URL. The website code may have to be modified to generate search engine friendly URL in each anchor tag that is parsed by the API.

Mod_rewrite module in Apache server is used to make a URL search engine friendly. A URL request for “http://www.mysite.com/album/viewcat.php/pageid.70/orderby.hitsD” may be translated by mod_rewrite to

“http://www.mysite.com/album/viewcat.php?pageid=70&orderby=hitsD“

depending on the regular expression specified.

The web programmer will have modify the script to generate URL’s of the type

“http://www.mysite.com/album/viewcat.php/pageid.70/orderby.hitsD”

instead of “http://www.mysite.com/album/viewcat.php?pageid=70&orderby=hitsD”

within the web pages so that all URLs on the website are search engine friendly.

source:SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND MARKETING by Binoy Varghese page 37-38

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