Changing Dynamic URL's

[abovetopsecret]

Hello everybody,

Ive got a few project underway to make my site more SE Friendly, and one of those projects is to look into how do I change a dynamic URL into a static one I suppose, so the URL's are better described. eg.

http://www.littleacornsgifts.co.uk/scripts/thread.php?threadid=12345

to something like this:

http://www.littleacornsgifts.co.uk/bobthebuilder.asp

I have got a lot of these links, so it would be a massive job to manually change them all, so has anybody else got a better solution. Im on a windows server too, not Linux.

Thanks

 

[ChrisHunt]

I don't know much about Windows hosting. On Apache it would be quite easy to use [tt]mod_rewrite[/tt] to (silently) redirect, say, [tt]littleacornsgifts.co.uk/products/bobthebuilder[/tt] to [tt]littleacornsgifts.co.uk/products.asp?name=bobthebuilder[/tt] . I assume it's possible to do something similar on IIS. Products.asp can then scan your database to serve up the appropriate page (You'd have to add a field to your database holding the friendly url name for each product).

However, frankly, I wouldn't bother. "Search Engine Friendly" URLs don't really make much difference in SEO these days, though they are admittedly a bit more people friendly.

You might be better off asking this question in the IIS or asp forums.

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd

 

[abovetopsecret]

Hi Chris, are you the only one in this forum. LOL!

Nice to speak to you again, and thanks for the reply. So in your opinion its a bit of a worthless job is it?

I picked up on a few threads in google, and all where harking on about the need to do it, and how much it would help, but you have been right in everything so far, so if in your opinion you wouldnt do it, then maybe I will shelve it, and crack on with other things.

Thanks

 

[ChrisHunt]

The SEO forum is blessed with two Chris H's - Chris Hirst, the knowledgable one, and me, the other one. I think your praise for the accuracy of previous advice should be directed to Mr Hirst.

With regard to the worth of "SE Friendly" URLs, just try doing a few searches on your engine of choice. You'll see plenty of supposedly unfriendly URLs at the top of many searches. SEs just don't appear to be bothered by such things these days (at least, provided you don't have excessive numbers of parameters in there).

What is true is that modified URLs are more friendly to people, who deal less well with 5-digit numbers than computers do. If you think there's a chance you might want to promote that URL to people, you should make if friendly.

If you do follow this path, it's important that each page has only one URL pointing to it - the old unfriendly URL should still work, but should 301 redirect to the friendly version.

If you like coding, it's a nice little challenge to get it all working right - but your time could probably be better spent.

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd

 

[ChrisHirst]

Chris is right on the so-called "Search Engine Friendly" URLs not being specially "SE Friendly". They are decidedly server unfriendly though.

Once you lose the parameters, Search Engines have no indication that the site is "database driven" so do not apply a delay between subsequent requests, and believe me SEs can request pages at a phenomonal rate. So, if your server or database is already loaded up, this could start giving problems with access times.
Absolutely DO NOT try it if your DB is Access

The very small SE benefit with static URLs against parameter based ones is massively outweighed by the disruption caused when changing all the existing ones over. It can be up to 6 months of lost or diminished SE traffic.

I use a custom 404 page to give the impression of static URLs and decode the querystring passed into the 404 to decide where the request is going to go and which record it is going to grab.

Similar to the code here ->

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=22759&st=15&p=242355&#entry242355

but a bit more involved

Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Woo Hoo! the cobblers kids get new shoes.
People Counting Systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[Zipster]

I would only do this if you were looking at rewriting your CMS.

The way that I changed my site to show friendly URLs was to do it at the content managment end. So first decide your directory structure, I was working on a holiday website at the time so I created a /holidays directory.

When the agent or consultant created a new destination on the CMS I used the FSO (File System Object) to output an asp file to the /holidays directory, so it would become:

/holidays/south-america.asp

How I got to use South America was by having a 40 char max edit box (bear in mind operating system file naming limitations) and lower-cased and replaced any non-friendly characters with a - (hyphen).

So if I had:

$1,000 holiday special

Would become

1-000-holiday-special

As above though, I don't think it'll really affect your SEO but it does look nice to the visitor and is easier on the eye.

Give it a try!

K Abbott IT Manager / Web Developer

http://www.kabbott.com

 

[samiam07]

Out of curiosity, does the .htaccess file have any bearing on this?

 

[ChrisHunt]

does the .htaccess file have any bearing on this?

It would have a huge bearing, if it weren't for the fact that he's hosted on windows (IIS, presumably), so he doesn't have a .htaccess file to play with.

One reason I always host my sites on unix servers.

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd

 

[abovetopsecret]

Thanks for everything guys, I think from talking to other people and from this site, I might give it a miss or come back to it at a later stage.

I know this is way off mark on this post, but I am worried that Im selling my site short in terms of offering out reciprical links, but on the other hand I wont to offer reciprical rather than paying for them, as we have only just kicked off and i need to buidl the site up.

At the bottom of my site I have a block of reciprical links, does anybody have any thoughts on this, as in do they think its cheap, or ok and will it effect my google listings in any way.

Thanks for everything again

 

[ChrisHirst]

forget reciprocal links!

Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Woo Hoo! the cobblers kids get new shoes.
People Counting Systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[abovetopsecret]

Hi Chris,

You would forget them completely would you? as in if that was your site you would take the lot down would you?

Isnt it an important part of my indexing in google though, as in if I take that lot away, they will remove me from their sites and i will lose out wont I?

 

[ChrisHirst]

Yep I would definitely take them down.

The chances are that having them in the footer isn't doing you any favours anyway, and the links from the other sites probably aren't of any real use.

Are any of them sending useful traffic at all?

Sure you do need some links pointing to your site, but link exchanges and enforced reciprocals are NOT the one to have.


Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
Woo Hoo! the cobblers kids get new shoes.
People Counting Systems

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

 

[abovetopsecret]

Hi Chris,

Ok I'm going to follow your advice and take the lot down, it always played on my mind why the likes of Hamleys, amazon etc never had any link pages like that, and I was selling the site cheap for doign it.

I get an odd clcick here and there from them, but nothing at all if you really put it in context, I was just under the illusion of that they where good directories, and therefore havign a link on their site would benefit me, so when they asked for a link back it just seemed reasonable and necessary.

Thanks