Hey Jake, I agree with what Johnny said. I would say it's necessary if you need that extra edge in a competitive keyword area. From my experience, the bots give higher points to folder names than they would to query string parameters. For example under keyword: "texas jobs"
I believe this link: www.mywebsite.com/index.cfm/jobs/texas would get more points than: www.mywebsite.com/index.cfm?jobs=texas When you are judging solely based on the link characters themselves not the content of the page. I have also noticed that subdomains are even higher points than folder names. Texas_jobs.mywebsite.com/index.cfm?jobs=texas Works even better. All you need to do is setup a wildcard subdomain on your DNS to point to the same place as your 'www' A record. The subdomain will essentially be ignored by your webserver and you can build these links into your pages for added points. Be careful with this one though, the links need to go to relevant content or someone could report your site to the search engine (this is very bad). So if it's easy for you to implement, I say give it a try. But don't spend half of your site optimization hours working on it. They would be much better spend generating <title> names, <h1> titles, subdomaining, etc... - Daniel Elmore -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jake Sent: Friday, December 17, 2004 6:09 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Search Engine Friendly URLs Thanks for the history. That puts all the pieces together I've heard discussion about. So do you think it's really that big of a deal these days to make the /index.cfm/action/something syntax? Or is it just a legacy thing that people hold onto more for nostalgia than for necessity? Jake Daniel Elmore wrote: >The term "search engine safe" was coined in the early search engine days >because spiders would skip links with &'s and ?'s when indexing your site. >The reason, AFAIK, was because the search engines didn't want to store pages >with dynamic content. Thinking it would degrade the accuracy of keyword >searches. This became a ridiculous idea as the web matured. Many static >pages are generated dynamically and most pages that use query strings are >actually creating "static" content. A link to a product description page for >example. So to get around this people started writing links like so: >http://www.mysite.com/index.cfm/action/something > >and then using a filter to convert the link. This fooled the spiders into >thinking it's a link to a page with static content. There are plenty of web >filters for the various middleware languages that allow your web server to >translate that url into the actual url. > >Things have slowly changed though and the spider bots are starting to allow >query strings with more and more attributes. So the value of the web filters >and the work involved to code your links like that is degrading rapidly. > >So in a nutshell, (I just realized that this tangent has not specially >answered your question) a search engine safe URL is constituted by having a >URL with no query string syntax (& and = and &). > > >-----Original Message----- >From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf >Of Jake >Sent: Friday, December 17, 2004 2:07 PM >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Subject: Search Engine Friendly URLs > >All, > >What is the consensus on what constitutes a "search engine safe" URL? >Would something like: > >www.mysite.com/index.cfm?action=something > >or > >www.mysite.com/index.cfm?action=something&ID=190 > >be SE safe? > >Jake > >---------------------------------------------------------- >To post, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] >To unsubscribe: > http://www.dfwcfug.org/form_MemberUnsubscribe.cfm >To subscribe: > http://www.dfwcfug.org/form_MemberRegistration.cfm > > > >---------------------------------------------------------- >To post, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] >To unsubscribe: > http://www.dfwcfug.org/form_MemberUnsubscribe.cfm >To subscribe: > http://www.dfwcfug.org/form_MemberRegistration.cfm > > > > > > ---------------------------------------------------------- To post, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: http://www.dfwcfug.org/form_MemberUnsubscribe.cfm To subscribe: http://www.dfwcfug.org/form_MemberRegistration.cfm ---------------------------------------------------------- To post, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: http://www.dfwcfug.org/form_MemberUnsubscribe.cfm To subscribe: http://www.dfwcfug.org/form_MemberRegistration.cfm
