Should I convert ? and = to slashes

[countdrak]

We have a dynamic website with a page for our product lines. I pull everything from a database and the layout remains the same. So suppose I have a page called productline.cfm ( The site is developed in coldfusion)

Now say if I have three products that we sell say phones,phone accessories and car acessories. My links look like this

http://www.mydomain.com/productline.cfm?IDS=1,2,3

when the use clicks the link "Phones"

When the user clicks "Phone Accessories" my link looks like

http://www.mydomain.com/productline.cfm?IDS=5,6,7

and so on.

Now google or yahoo cant really display these dynamic pages,it seems like they dont cache the above links. They only cache

http://www.mydomain.com

and that is the problem. I was asked to convert the above links to

http://www.mydomain.com/productline.cfm/IDS/5/6/7

http://www.mydomain.com/productline.cfm/IDS=1/2/3

so to convert all the ampersands and equal to signs to slashes and then our pages would be cached correctly? Does anyone think that will help? This will require a huge database conversion, coz everything on the website is dynamic even the menu and the links. Please advice. Thanks.

 

[dflanagan]

The parts do have a page of their own. These URLs are just a way to navigate to them without using cookies or form posts because I read that the crawlers cannot use them.

Dave

 

[damber]

Not sure why you are doing a redirect. I don't know what ASP does, but with ColdFusion I have been using a 404 page to Capture the variables in the url "mode/var1/var2/var3" and then depending on the "mode" in a case, that is where I decide what to do and which page to "Include" for actual processing of the page.

Server.Transfer(cstr(mode) & ".asp?id=var1&xyz=var2&123=var3")

Be cautious though, using an invalid page reference which is not found, running the error script, then that in turn running the target page will add extra processing overhead for almost every hit of your site. For big websites, little things like this add up.

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