Dynamic page
-
I have few pages on my site that are with this nature
/locator/find?radius=60&zip=&state=FL
I read at Google webmaster that they suggest not to change URL's like this
"According to Google's Blog (link below) they are able to crawl the simplified dynamic URL just fine, and it is even encouraged to use a simple dynamic URL ( " It's much safer to serve us the original dynamic URL and let us handle the problem of detecting and avoiding problematic parameters. " )
_http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html _It can also actually lead to a decrease as per this line: " We might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URLs if you try to make your urls look static and in the process hide parameters which offer the Googlebot valuable information. "The URLs are already simplified without any extra parameters, which is the recommended structure from Google:"Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That's our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems"I would love to get some opinions on this also please consider that those pages are not cached by Google for some reason.
-
I think this is an answer that goes beyond Google. We use rewrites extensively and do not have any problems. There are some caveats
- Regarding GoogleBot missing information, you just need to make sure that the new URL has all the info.
Lets say you are a plumbing portal and use
/locator/find?radius=60&zip=&state=FL
rewrite to
/plumbers/florida-fl/miami/33110/
Your search radius can be a default value vs having to put it in as a parameter.
It helps with site structure to think of things as how they would be as a static directory. In this case, you are actually giving more information to GoogleBot with the rewritten URL vs the old one as you have included who you are searching for (a plumber) the city (miami), state (fl) and zip code (33110). The previous URL only indicated the state. If you dont like using all the folders, you can simply have a longer file name with dashes in between the words.
-
If you use rewrites, make sure Google is not spidering the original URLs otherwise you get penalized for duplicate errors. Monitoring Webmaster Tools or using spider software will help you find the holes. You can then use things like Canonical Links and Noindex Tags to get the old URLs out of the index and make sure Google has the correct pages. This all depends on how you implement your rewrites.
-
If you take some time to look at how you want to organized your site to start with then the first two items will take care of themselves usually. A good exercise is to write down how all of this would work within a breadcrumb navigation. This forces you to get organized and also helps you setup how you want all your pages to be shown to Google. If you do start to add parameters on top of this basic structure like pagination or other sortable options, you need to think how you would noindex, follow those pages to make sure that your main page would rank for a given key phrase vs all the other sorted versions of the same page.
-
One thing that is overlooked in setting up this kind of structure is that you can use it to your advantage in your analytic tools to look at global trends to your site. This could be in any site. Using the example above, all US states are at the 2nd level directory, cities are 3rd and zip is 4th. Makes it really super easy to use a regexp on urls to group them. For example, you could setup a filter in you analytics to easily combine all sessions that looked at pages in Florida and wanted to see what the next action was.
Cheers!
-
Hi,
I think that this does not mean, that you have to avoid rewriting dynamic urls at all but take care of the accessibility of your information.
for your url it could be interesting to build your domain like:
/locator/florida/find?radius=60
/locator/24786/find?radius=60or even better:
/stores-near-florida/find?range=60 /stores-near-24786/find?range=60
the suggestion of google just sais, that you have to avoid that information is being lost by mapping your dynamic url to a static. you should leave the radius parameter in the url because google could vary this parameter.
-
correction the pages are found by Google
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Pages with Duplicate Content
When I crawl my site through moz, it shows lots of Pages with Duplicate Content. The thing is all that pages are pagination pages. How should I solve this issue?
Technical SEO | | 100offdeal0 -
Is it easier to rank high with a front page than a landing page?
My product is laptop and of cause, I like to rank high for the keyword "laptop". Do any of you know if the search engines tends to rank a front page higher than a landing page? Eg. www.brand.com vs. www.brand.com/laptop
Technical SEO | | Debitoor0 -
Duplicate Page Title
Our pages has so many DUPLİCATE PAGE TİTLE
Technical SEO | | iskq
I want to change all of them, is it right way?0 -
Specific Link Page in Domain
Hi everyone: I have seen that many SEO Agencies have contacted my business (Also SEO but In- House) in order to interchange links. They have created a specific page on their site with the Label "Links" or similar, and on that page they add multiple links of the competence. I have heard that you can only do that if you make sure you add two things: No follow in links. Not inserting links of websites that have nothing to do with our sector. Either way, I have never found this amusing. I always recommend people not to do this but I have my doubts after all. ¿Could some one give me their opinion? Cheers !
Technical SEO | | Tintanus0 -
Does this page crawl well?
I just put up a page that uses an image map to illustrate a national currency note. http://www.antiquebanknotes.com/NationalCurrency/National-Bank-Note-Information.aspx My goal with this page is get results for National Bank Note. But I know image maps are wierd creatures and not good for linking. My question is, will Google index my tooltips and find this page useful and therefore worthy? I think the content is useful for my users but I just don't know if the implementation will work well. This screen will eventually have 5 or 6 notes on it and I don't want to do it the concensus is negative... Thanks for any advice.
Technical SEO | | Banknotes0 -
How do I know which page a link is from
I've got an interesting situation. I hope you can help. I have a list of links but I'm not sure which pages of my site they are from. How do I know which page a specific link is from? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | VinceWicks0 -
301 lots of old pages to home page
Will it hurt me if i redirect a few hundred old pages to my home page? I currently have a mess on my hands with many 404's showing up after moving my site to a new ecommerce server. We have been at the new server for 2 years but still have 337 404s showing up in google webmaster tools. I don't think it would affect users as very few people woudl find those old links but I don't want to mess with google. Also, how much are those 404s hurting my rank?
Technical SEO | | bhsiao1 -
On Page 301 redirect for html pages
For php pages youve got Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
Technical SEO | | shupester
Header( "Location: http://www.example.com" );
?> Is there anything for html pages? Other then Or is placing this code redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.php in the .htaccess the only way to properly 301 redirect html pages? Thanks!0