URL rewrite 2

[audiopro]

An SEO company are suggesting URL rewrites on all of a client's website links, is this advisable or more SEO pie in the sky?

Is

[URL unfurl="true"]http://www.mysite.com/mysubject[/URL]

more SEO friendly than

[URL unfurl="true"]http://www.mysite.com/mysubject?move=shaker&session=2020030030303&take=blank[/URL]

I am unsure as this same company are telling him that his email address should be available on his website instead of the existing contact form.


Keith

http://www.studiosoft.co.uk

 

[ChrisHunt]

This is probably a question for forum828 . I think there's some truth in what they say, but it depends on what your existing URLs are like.

Way back, in days of old, before most content was delivered via a CMS, search engines were suspicious of any URL containing a query string. That's not to say that such pages were not listed, but they did have a barrier to overcome in joining the index.

These days, SEs are a lot more tolerant of query strings and there's no technical reason not to have someting like [tt]example.com?pageid=1234[/tt]

However - nothing in the SEO world is simple, so here's a few things to consider...

1) Session IDs. Your example appears to have a session ID in it. These are problematic, as everybody visiting a given page will be doing so on a different URL. If they decide to link to the page, they'll do so with different URLs too. That's not doing you any favours with link-based engines. If you have to use session IDs, you should mark up your pages with a canonical <link> element, as described in

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

2) User appeal. Computers don't care what characters you use to describe a given page, but people are more picky. If you want people to remember addresses to particular pages, pass them on to their friends and/or link to them accurately, short, simple URLs made up of words are better than long ones.

3) Keywords. You may get some SEO benefit from having keywords in your URL, but it's very hard to quantify. It shouldn't do you any harm though.

-- Chris Hunt
Webmaster & Tragedian
Extra Connections Ltd

 

[audiopro]

The example was just a general example.
I only use session id's on submitted forms which I don't want indexing anyway.
I have some other questions regarding this so I will address the to the SEO forum and see what they suggest.

Thanks

Keith

http://www.studiosoft.co.uk