Re: Best way to display content for search engines?

Michael Fesser schreef:
.oO(Erwin Moller)

If so, you can simply make URLs that contain your id's.
eg:
http://www.example.com/showItem.php?categoryid=24&itemid=675

You don't have to make seperate pages for each item.

If you want to make a page with everything in a category, just do so.
Google won't rank you higher or lower when you have one since all incoming links come from yourself.
See pageranking for details:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pageranking

You can find a lot of garbage on the web that claims you should make your URLs human-readable, claiming should use mod_rewrite (for Apache) to translate
http://www.example.com/usedcars/suzuki/showItem.php
to
http://www.example.com/showItem.php?categoryid=24&itemid=675

I don't agree.
It is alot of hassle for little benefit in my humble opinion.

Readable URLs are of no benefit? Do you care more about search engines
than about your users?

I know almost no people who memorise complete URLs.
(I know only a few by heart because I used them very very often and have been on the internet for a long time.)

Everybody bookmarks.


A more userfriendly URL would look like this:

http://www.example.com/nameOfCategory24/675

I don't see much advantage, especially not the 675 part.



Shorter, easier to read and easier to understand (from a bookmark for
example). The category number 24 is totally meaningless for a human
user. What matters is the category name, which should be present in the
URL.

Shorter? Not excactly.
compare:
http://www.example.com/cat=12&item=112
with:
http://www.example.com/seconhandcars/SuzukiSwift1.6Sedan
That was my old car. ;-)

Easier to read? Yes, but what is the freaking point?
Are you really suggesting to remeber URL?
Maybe I have serious memory issues, but I love to bookmark and hate to remember.

Easier to understand? Understand an URL? WHo cares?


And Google thinks so too:
Read this:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html

Especially this article - even if it comes from Google - is full of
nonsense!

That is not very convincing Micha.
Forgive me I take the word of Google over yours...


Don't get me wrong: If you want to use human readable URLS, use them. Just don't use them to get better rankings on Google since you won't get better rankings.

Exactly. Websites should be _userfriendly_! SEO is secondary and often
comes automatically with userfriendly sites.

I agree to you statement that websites should be userfriendly (in general).
But you seem to suggest using ids in the URL is userUNFRIENDLY, which it isn't.



Micha

Even though I often respect your opinion and read your comments with pleasure, I think you are deadwrong this time. ;-)


Regards,
Erwin Moller

--
"There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult."
-- C.A.R. Hoare
.

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