Friendly URLS?

phunklord · #1 (**permalink**) 08-15-2005, 12:11 PM

Hi all,

Is there a clean, ideally SEO friendly way of cleaning up messy URLs? By messy, I mean something to the effect of:

"www.site.com/sitegoods.jsp?PRODUCT%3C%3Eprd_id=123456&FOLDER%3C %3Efolder_id=123654&fromTemplate=navigation%2Fsubc ategory.jsp&bmUID=123654"

Would it be possible to mask that somehow so that it read a little cleaner and possibly included some keywords? Any input is good input and much appreciated. Thanks again.

pl

**brian.mark** · #2 (**permalink**) 08-15-2005, 12:48 PM

ISAPI Rewrite on IIS or mod_rewrite on Apache. You can make that much prettier.

Brian.

phunklord · #3 (**permalink**) 08-15-2005, 01:35 PM

Thanks for the quick reply, Brian.

Will the renaming affect the search engine positioning? i.e. will the site be punished for using ISAPI or mod_rewrite? Or will the new friendly URLs actually help the positioning (as much as can be expected)?

kservik · #4 (**permalink**) 08-15-2005, 01:46 PM

It will only be posetive in the long term as long as you dont overstuff with keywords.

Btw, anyone got a tutorial on ISAPI Rewrite on IIS?

Kim

**brian.mark** · #5 (**permalink**) 08-15-2005, 03:28 PM

You'll want to do a 301 redirect from the old page to the new, then you just have to wait for the engines to understand the new page. Our experience was that it took about 4 weeks for the rankings to come back to where they were... we were slightly reduced for a while. The end result was favorable.

But then the question comes up - if you're worried about rankings, then you must be doing ok already so why would you want to change anything? If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Spiders can handle dynamic URL's better than most people give them credit for.

Brian.

almer · #6 (**permalink**) 08-25-2005, 04:36 AM

Hello,

My site is spidered oke, thus no problem with google. But the question remains how important are keywords in your URL?

If this is a major factor I would have mod_rewrote it yesterday.

Anybody know how much keywording your URL affects your ranking?

kservik · #7 (**permalink**) 08-25-2005, 06:28 AM

In Norway it matters a lot.

It is a great market to monitor such effects, because the index isnt that big and it is easier to see what kind of effects different tactics will result in.

Also not that many update sites that often or employ a lot of SEO and linkbuilding tactics.