As any SEO expert will tell you, having a site full of intelligently optimised pages is not much use if your URLs aren’t search engine-friendly. By search engine-friendly, what is usually meant is that your URLs are static. A dynamic URL contains a number of elements that results in a slower indexing period from the search engines, which overrides your other SEO efforts.

The sites that most commonly suffer from the burden of dynamic URLs are e-commerce sites. Blogs driven by WordPress also often have trouble, as do forums and sites that use content management systems. Most sites that are driven by a database are likely to produce dynamic URLs as well. Dynamic URLs offer up a complex address, which confuses both search engines and users.

Changing your dynamic URLs into static, or static-looking, URLs should be a basic part of your optimisation efforts. This is something that you can perform on your own before you approach a search engine optimisation company, or something you can ask your consultant to perform. It doesn’t take too long to fix this problem, and many companies leave it to their SEO firm to deal with simply because it’s the easier, safer path. If you are unsure of how to fix dynamic URLs, consulting an expert is advisable, and you can talk to us at SEO Consult.

Example 1

The forum on your site has a content management system that wasn’t written with the search engines in mind. As a result, it produces URLs for each thread in the format:

www.sitedomain.com/forumname/threadname.php?threadIDnumber=77777
&sortformat=timecode

which ends up as something like:

www.joeblogg.com/forum/existenz.php?ID=796887&sort=260807

Example 2

Your online retail store has a dynamic content management system which produces URLs in reaction to a user’s search parameters. The majority of your pages therefore have a URL that looks like this

www.smartshop.co.uk/products.php?categoryID=7932&productID=563001

This means that not only do all of your products have a non-search engine-friendly URL, your categories have them as well. Your most valuable pages are unlikely to be crawled.

Example 3

Your business is invested in making your site visitors feel like a part of your community. Your software creates session IDs for each visitor in order to present a customised page and make them feel more at home. Every one of your URLs therefore looks like:

www.handyhints.net/viewarticles.php?sid=179869&i=3

The danger is that the search engines will decide that this URL is too difficult to deal with, or that the search engine spiders will follow it up until the ‘?’. This latter path can lead to duplicate content issues.

The first step to take is to reprogram to get rid of the non-search engine-friendly characters, in other words the ‘?’ and ‘&’. This is the basic thing to do to make them look static. If you want your URLs to work for your SEO, however, you need to take things a step further and name your product categories, forum threads and other individual elements with keywords rather than number IDs.

Related posts:

1. SEO: Why Dynamic URLs are so Problematic
   Dynamic content can be a boon to a site. It allows you to address individual user needs, keep your content fresh-looking, and basically do a...
2. Dynamic Versus Static Page URLs
   Dynamic websites are becoming increasingly common, spurred on even further by the addition of web 2.0 applications to many sites. A dynamic page reduces the...
3. Are your URLs friendly?
   The URLs for your pages may seem like a jumble of words, letters, numbers and symbols, but their construction can have a significant impact on...
4. Dynamically driving down SEO
   A dynamically generated website uses server-side scripts and a database to determine which information is displayed to the user. Most, if not all dynamically generated...
5. Dynamic content rules
   If your site has any e-commerce functions, dynamic content management systems or user-specific presentation, you will be familiar with dynamic content. Dynamic content was once...

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 7th, 2010 at 8:45 am and is filed under SEO Techniques. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.