The URL's Have Left The Building...
One part of the site that has already been completed has been the "cleaning up" of the URL's in the site. We cover this a lot in the magazine, and it is a pretty common topic among Search Engine Optimization discussions lately. Rumor has it that search engines will not index pages with URL's that look like:
exampleaddress.com/catalog/index.php?cat=20394&id=1234534
That is actually a bit of an overstatement. The truth is that most search engines will follow these URLS, however there are limitations. For example, one such variable (these are passed after the ? symbol) might be a unique user id or session id. These are generated by the server and are usually long strings of numbers. These are bad. Don't expect a search engine to effectively index any URL that has a session id or other unique id.
Secondly, a good rule to follow is that if there are less than three relatively short variables being passed, search engines should index it just fine.
However, it is important to note that the search engines realize when they see the ? symbol in the URL that the site is accessing a database. In order to prevent too many hits on a database in short period, the search engines will index these pages more slowly. It's a nice thing for them to do, especially if you have a huge site with extremely high traffic that would be slowed down for your customers if the search engines index it too quickly. For the rest of us, which is nearly everyone, this is not worth it.
So here is why we wanted our URL's to be cleaned up:
Search engine optimization - we wanted our URLs to be nice and clean, containing no traces of dynamic content to slow the indexing down. For the most part we were able to convert the following URL:
exampleaddress.com/index.php?cat=34&page=2
into nice pretty URL's like this:
exampleaddress.com/34/2
It seem like a minor thing, but it is worth it for the search engines. There are many ways of accomplishing this, including using mod_rewrite to rewrite the URLs. The best things that I can say about getting started with this is make sure that you know exactly what all your URL's are going to be site wide before beginning this.
We also wanted our readers to be able to copy and paste URLs into emails, or tell people about them without them being complicated. After all, if you look at the URL's above, it's much easier to say to someone on the phone, "Go to exampleaddress.com/34/2" than it is to spell out the first example.
This method allows our tracking software to give us a better idea of what is happening on our site. Rather than passing variables to a single page, we are created completely new (even though they are fake) URL's. In our case this helps our analytics software, Google Analytics, to better provide us with information. By setting up some special code, we are able to see exactly what content our users are viewing, and not just what pages they are seeing.
Of course, since we are using other external applications, there have been complications. For example, our forum is powered by phpBB, which is an open source forum software. Since it wasn't written by me, I can't control it. I am sure that there is a module or add-on out there that will do it, but there are more important things for me to deal with right now.
Also, these blogs are powered by WordPress, which I must say has an excellent control panel option for presenting clean URL's. Not only that, but our subscription membership software, aMember Pro, which controls the access to our premium content and manages our subscribers and affiliates, has had no problems adjusting to the URL scheme that we have implemented.
I am done preaching about URLs.
