Is Mod ReWrite needed?

[john678]

Hi all,

I have links on my site like: http://www.affiliateseeking.com/ppcaff.php?keyword=S
http://www.affiliateseeking.com/ppcaff.php?keyword=A
etc.

Do you think that I should keep with the above links or will I get more traffic from the major search engines if I actually used Mod ReWrite to change the urls so that they are more search engine friendly.

For example:
http://www.affiliateseeking.com/ppcaff/k/S
http://www.affiliateseeking.com/ppcaff/k/A

The reasons why I ask this is because the search engines have already crawled and listed the first urls that I have mentioned, but I was wondering if I would get a higher ranking if I used the more search engine friendly urls?

[jestep]

It would never hurt. It looks better for the search engines and better for any human audience so If you know how to do it, I would say that it would be worth it. May help in the SERPS a little, but their getting pretty good with dynamic links so probably not all that much.

[wmabear54]

Also just to jump in here if he does do a mod_rewrite will he also need to do a redirect in this situation or is all that taken care of in the rewrite

Mike

[HardCoded]

You'll definitely have an easier time of it with the spiders. But perhaps doing /ppcaff/k/S introduces an unnecessary extra level of nesting.Unless you plan to do /ppcaff/e/1 and /ppcaff/d/1 for your other two PPC sort orders. It seems you don't have an awful lot of parameters, so you could easily just tell one single script to do all the work for your whole site.

Affiliate type
Sort method
Sort key
Page (for multiple page results)

ie. /ppc/alpha/S/1
and /pps/cat/books/2

This has the added advantage that the URLs are "hackable", so people can clip off parts of the URL and get to something meaningful. So e.g. if they got to /ppc you give them a place to pick a sort method, if they get to /ppc/alpha/ they get a place to pick a letter or they get A by default, and so on.

Also just to jump in here if he does do a mod_rewrite will he also need to do a redirect in this situation or is all that taken care of in the rewrite

No, mod_rewrite will do all the work. A redirect would be counter-productive to the original goal of being more spider-friendly.