Re: Best way to display content for search engines?

..oO(Erwin Moller)

Michael Fesser schreef:
.oO(Erwin Moller)

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.

You don't always have 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.

Could also be the name of the article.

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?

For example on a printed medium <http://www.example.com/cat=12&item=112>
doesn't really look good and is even harder to type. Ever seen such a
URL in an advertising?

Maybe I have serious memory issues, but I love to bookmark and hate to
remember.

Easier to understand? Understand an URL? WHo cares?

There are many situations where it helps to know what a page is all
about by just looking at the URL. Surely

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html

is easier to read and understand even without clicking it than something
like

https://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=32069983&postID=7266186239298631175

where all you have are some numbers (yes I know it's not exactly the
same page, but they're related). Additionally the first one can be
expected to be the more stable and "stronger" URL in regard to "Cool
URIs don't change" and its hints about how to design good URLs. It
would be even better without the trailing .html, but that's just a
minor issue.

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...

Just read through some of the comments. You'll often find words like
"confusing", "ridiculous", "stupid". Of course you can also find many
comments which explain more reasonably why this article doesn't make
much sense and ignores the fact that users are more important than bots.

(Ironically they do exactly the same thing that they try to discourage
authors from. The above URL surely looks "static", even though its
content comes from a database.)

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.

Not in general, but in many cases URLs with half a dozen parameters can
be considered user-unfriendly and could be improved.

Micha
.

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