Thread

Hi,

I’ve just finished reading this article over at Google Webmaster blog - Dynamic vs Static links.

Am I right in assuming that Google are saying the way that Expression Engine creates ‘friendly’ urls is no longer recommended practice for search engine crawling?

Personally it doesn’t bother me, because I think the static-looking urls are more human-friendly, but seo-mad clients are bound to raise it.

thanks

Kim

what they are pointing out is not that humans might find it easier, not that it is better for SEO, just that it is not 100% necessary - like it once was…
I have seen the change from no variables, through to one variable, and now as many variables as your want in the url… Just don;t confuse them with too much crap!!

the example they give:
http://www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo?language=en&answer=3&sid=98971298178906&query=URL

logic dictates taking out the session id, and query part… Leaving en, and 3… The language part is not really that different whether you re-write or not, and if you drop an article id of 3 into your rewritten url, then you are not rally benefiting (probably loosing out on load time if your on a shared host, as it will take longer to translate the page address, and therefore load).

But SEO URL’s would not look at the above like this… They would possibly replace the “3” with the article title, jamming it full of keywords. And as far as i am concerned, keywords in your URL, as close to the beginning as possible are still valuable - people might disagree though!

Interesting article, but I don’t think this has immediate ramifications for EE. We are not rewriting URLs, as such, we are creating them that way.

I think my worry was this statement from the (EE Docs:

The goal was to make the URLs produced by ExpressionEngine search-engine friendly by making the URL structure mimic a traditional static site. In order to accomplish this, the use of query strings was eliminated from the URLs.

conflicting with this statement from Google :

Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That’s our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems. If you transform your dynamic URL to make it look static you should be aware that we might not be able to interpret the information correctly in all cases.

But if I follow what you are saying Ingrid, that the setup for EE never includes these parameters (ie they are not rewritten as Google are suggesting), then that sounds like no problem for EE.

Doh! Sorry Ingmar!