Is this URL safe to be indexed by Major SEs?

[Jeremy]

Hi there,

Just a question in regards to some URL rewriting i've had my web developer do for me. Are these URLs ok to be indexed, and will they be seen treated as a seperate page in search results?

URL Examples:
http://www.domain.com/home (for the index page)
http://www.domain.com/products/c/Bags_&_Backpacks (for a product category)
http://www.domain.com/products/c/Bags_&_Backpacks/p/24_Box_of_Magnet_Muffins
(for a product detail page)
http://www.domain.com/products/f/Corporate,Magenta,$30-50
(for a product sub-category/classification page)

Any advice would be appreciated, thanks in advance :)

[Jazajay]

Yeah they are fine. You should redirect them to avoid dup.content issues. Bare in mind this will mean your pages will take a knock in the SERPs till it passes over. It could be a day to 6months. But you shouldn't have an issue

[Jeremy]

Thanks for your reply on this! I'm using this url structure for my site redesign, so either way its going to be risky while i redirect my old content pages to the new site

Thanks again :)

[Jazajay]

No worries.

I would make them slightly friendlier though as in get rid of the c and the p and probably the products dir as well. It would look better to the end user and would be a lot smaller which is worth it.

Remember at lot of users are thick/misunderstand concepts when it comes to computing and a long URL can scare some new internet users especially if it has parameters on the end. Trojans and worms scare a few of my friends and one even thinks if you go on Ebay you will get your identity stolen regardless of what I rell her. The internet is still relatively new to a lot of people so keep it simple. I mean 15% of users that hit my site still use dial up.

The end of the day why shouldn't it just show sitedomain.com/cat/product.htm

Prime example is if you add a picture of a shopping cart next to view your basket/cart it will increase your conversion rates slightly. Shows you how thick some people are. Does the picture mean it's any more safe? No. But you can see a improvement to your CR's depending on your type of customer. I added it and my conversion went up by 0.3% after 2 months and now remains steady. The site stayed the same as I wanted to test it. it works!

My dads a classic I had to set him an email account up the other day and he was petrified that cookies would crash his computer. I explained them to him and he was still unsure. He doesn't use the internet a lot bless him but hes a prime example. lol

Take care

An all the best

Jaza