URL Rewriting – Is it really necessary?

In the past, Search Engines including major ones like Google, Yahoo and MSN had hard time understanding and indexing pages that are dynamically generated. In such dynamic pages, a single page can deliver multiple page contents depending upon what the user has input. For example, the dynamic url http://www.xyz.com/abc/def.asp?x=12&y=adf&z=45 delivers one page content while http://www.xyz.com/abc/def.asp?x=2&y=adf&z=34 delivers completely different content even though both of these links are using the same file ‘def.asp’. Search Engines in the past were not smart enough and thus would consider both these links as one file and indexes just one. However, SEs now can understand and parse all these types of links regardless of their complex structure with querystrings. It is considered that all major Search Engines can now handle dynamic urls up to 3-4 querystrings. So, you will be okay and be assured that your site will be indexed properly even if your site is dynamic. However, static pages are always good over the dynamic pages. So, why not take the advantage of static pages by URL rewriting? URL Rewriting, Mod-Rewrite in Apache server, is the process to convert dynamic urls to static urls. By having static urls, you will make the urls friendlier and easier for end users, In addition, static urls I think rank better in search engines than dynamic ones.

How to make a Search Engine Robot Friendly Site?

There are so many things that you can do to make your site search engine friendly so that Robots of search engines can easily crawl your site pages and index them properly. Here are some basic and simple rules for making your site SE friendly.

• Make all pages of your site reachable from the main (home) page in not more than three clicks.
• Create a “SiteMap” page that has links of all the pages within your site, which you want search engines to index.
• Consider having about 250 – 300 words of content in a page. If you make a page too long, search engine will just ignore them. Generally, most search engines don’t index more than 100 KB of text on a page.
• Avoid making image links or writing key phrases or content in image or flash objects.
• Make sure you don’t have any broken links. Also, make sure there are no common mistakes.
• If possible, don’t use script navigation. Also minimize the use of scripts because search engines cannot read scripts.
• If you dynamically display content of pages extracting from database, try not to pass too many parameters through the querystring. Search engines are not smart enough to understand all the passed variables.
• You can use the file “robots.txt” to describe how you want search engine robots to behave within your site.
• Make sure your site is up all the time with out any server crash.
• Attain as many quality inbound links as possible. This will ensure your site to be indexed quickly and also the higher page rank.