SEO

WebmasterWorld.com: Search Engine Friendly Links Best Left to the Pros

Jim Morgan gives information regarding the complexity of achieving static, search engine friendly URLs with mod_rewrite.

He notes that it is one of the most widely asked questions on their forums due to the complexity.

He provides a general overview of the basics including internal and external processing, htaccess, httpd.conf, conf.d, and regular expressions.

What is to be learned?

• Search Engine Friendly URLs are an extremely complex task that should only be attempted by advanced developers.

Notes on vBSEO

• The vBSEO development team has mastered the process of implementing search engine friendly URLs - but that is just one part of the total vBSEO solution.
• The vBSEO solution takes many users less than 5 minutes to install and configure.
• The result is a search engine optimized forum in the time it takes to microwave a tv dinner! This is a huge cost savings compared with the expense of attempting to implement a similar system.

For Discussion

• Do you think the difficultly in creating search engine friendly URLs has decreased their popularity despite the fact that most blogs and major websites realize their importance?

Source:
Changing Dynamic URLs to Static URLs

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Joe Ward / Crawlability Inc.
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Yes I do. I know because I would not have Search Engine Friendly Urls if it werent for VBSEO

I think that this is certainly the case. Also most people are well unaware of the capabilities of what their hosting can actually provide, whilst Wordpress provides the ability to rewrite URLs within the Site Admin this just reinforces its usability, but the vBulletin community as a whole seems to somewhat overlook the issue of rewriting URLs as being reserved for more advanced "techny" administrators :(

I have implemented SEO friendly URL's across many applications using both PHP and ASP (on IIS, which has no mod-rewrite or any equivelent.. in short, a bitch)

To be honest the process comes natural to me as an SEO peep, however I'm sure glad I didnt have to go down this road with vBulletin... all the leg work was done.

I did in the past completly SEO a phpBB forum (before our move to vB)with static URL's and everything else to boot.

I think just about any programmer (be it ASP, PHP, JSP, Colf Fusion) could implement Static URL's with some hard plod and tweaking.... with most however its just a question of 'Can I be arsed?'

Obviously non-techies rely on the web developers.

Static URLs are on the increase if you ask me.

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Rob Collyer - SEO Specialist
StudentMidwife.NET

I'm looking for evidence that this significantly helps.

You want evidence huh?

How's this lot straight from the horses mouth (cut / pasted from here somewhere)

Info from Google.com Regarding Dynamic & Static URLs

http://www.google.com/ads/glossary.html
Search optimization. Tactics and techniques that make it easier for spiders to find your page, contributing to higher ranking on a list of search engine results. Basic optimization starts with listing relevant keywords in your metatags and building clear and descriptive words into page copy, title, text hyperlinks, and image file names. It's also important to design your site on a logical link structure and follow standard HTML conventions, avoiding the use of frames, dynamic URLs, Image Maps, and JavaScript for navigation.


http://www.google.com/webmasters/2.html
Your pages are dynamically generated. We're able to index dynamically generated pages. However, because our web crawler could overwhelm and crash sites that serve dynamic content, we limit the number of dynamic pages we index. In addition, our crawlers may suspect that a URL with many dynamic parameters might be the same page as another URL with different parameters. For that reason, we recommend using fewer parameters if possible. Typically, URLs with 1-2 parameters are more easily crawlable than those with many parameters.


http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.


http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=745
Consider creating static copies of dynamic pages. Although the Google index includes dynamic pages, they comprise a small portion of our index. If you suspect that your dynamically generated pages (such as URLs containing question marks) are causing problems for our crawler, you might create static copies of these pages. If you do, don't forget to add the dynamic pages to your robots.txt file to prevent us from treating them as duplicates.


http://www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=745 (Duplicate content)
Don't create multiple copies of a page under different URLs. Many sites offer text-only or printer-friendly versions of pages that contain the same content as the corresponding graphic-rich pages. In order to ensure that your preferred page is included in our search results, you'll need to block duplicates from our spiders using a robots.txt file. For information about using a robots.txt file, please visit http://www.google.com/remove.html

Yes - I know what Google says. My site first went live on 5 January 1996, I've used Google Adsense for about 3 years, and read Danny Sullivan's Search Engine Watch (and used to subscribe to his newsletter) when Danny first put up his site in the 1990's - So I'm not a 'newbie' as to what SEO is about.

I was actually referring to websites that could show evidence that vbseo made a significant difference rather than what Google has been saying for several years now.

Search engine spiders have come a long way. I don't doubt vbseo has some advantages, but I'm not convinced aspects such as nonreciprical inbound links from major sites (as opposed to, for example, from link farms and reciprical links) are not more important.

OK - Well, I don't want to start anything here. I've been looking at vbseo for a while and am thinking about it. I may do it in the future. The BigDaddy update has been very kind to me including an increase in traffic from Google so for right now I think I'm going to keep things as they are. I do appreciate your reply, however.

I'd probally recommend checking out the vBSEO Reviews forum, which has the experiences of those running vBSEO, how the majority of users have experienced traffic increases and increases in referrals from leading search engines too.

To check this go to administration > System > System Info. Click on PHP Information tab. Scroll down until you find Loaded Modules row. mod_rewrite should be listed here. If it’s not loaded ask your web host to activate mod_rewrite.
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oliviaharis