Mod-Rewrite...php/asp.net

[aspXtony]

Hey Everyone, first I just want to say thanks to EVERYONE posting. It is really nice to have such a great community like we the web community have. :)

My question is regarding mod-rewrite. I am new to SEO and I was at the recent WebmasterWorld.com conference and learned alot. One thing i heard about dynamic content is that you can write a mod-rewrite for your dynamic pages so they show up statically on your site. I was wondering if anyone could tell me if this will help my company's site and my sites in the future. Also, do you guys know of some good links or places to go where I can research this and do some of my own personal testing. I would appreciate all the help I can get.

THANKS AHEAD OF TIME!!!!

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

Welcome, aspXtony, and thank you!

Rewriting dynamic URLs is usualy only something you should consider if you specifically have indexing problems - in other words, if your pages are not getting indexed by the major engines. If your pages (or the majority of them) are in facg getting indexed then you don't have to do URL-rewriting - it won't do you much good anyway.

Even if you do have indexing problems rewriting URLs may not always solve them all. Very often there are many issues on a dynamic website that somehow restrict, confuse or completely limit the search engine spiders from crawling and indexing your website.

Generally speaking, URL-rewrite is most often used on websites that have really long and ugly URLs - often with multiple parameters (?parameter1=value1&parameter2=value2 etc etc). The rewrite is done to make the URLs more simple and remove parameters. Often the final URL-format is made to look like a static web page (simple exmple):

From:
domain.com/index.asp?parameter1=value1&parameter2=value2

To:
domain.com/index/parameter1_value1/parameter2_value2.html

Even though this looks like a static page it is still as dynamic as it was before

[fathom]

Hey Everyone, first I just want to say thanks to EVERYONE posting. It is really nice to have such a great community like we the web community have. :)

My question is regarding mod-rewrite. I am new to SEO and I was at the recent WebmasterWorld.com conference and learned alot. One thing i heard about dynamic content is that you can write a mod-rewrite for your dynamic pages so they show up statically on your site. I was wondering if anyone could tell me if this will help my company's site and my sites in the future. Also, do you guys know of some good links or places to go where I can research this and do some of my own personal testing. I would appreciate all the help I can get.

THANKS AHEAD OF TIME!!!!

While it can help in some situations - often you don't need to do it and it can also make problem-solving far more difficult 'if the problem isn't removed first'.

Some thing to consider first:

1. Are session ids disabled? A bot cannot 'action' a click to login or except a cookie. This is most often the problem.

2. Limted URL params. Bots are not goods with non-alpha-numermic character e.g. & = +

Best bet here if you cannot easily change revert these to unicode e.g. & is & changing these the bot will have no problem crawling.

3. Avoid extremely long URL strings.

4. Includes - [more specific to ranking than crawling] http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=3181

In the end 'if' you do a mod rewrite [which can help] but the above are still a factor - you just made things worse.

[aspXtony]

Moderator was actually bringing up a good point in that the number of search strings in the url is long for our site at times...sometimes with 2 or 3 strings. That is one thing I would love to change and I believe I forgot to mention in my original post. Fathom you also brought up a good point about session id's. I understood it to an extent...but i didn't clearly get it...could you explain more about that? Also, any resources I could check out regarding changing the url's...

[fathom]

Fathom you also brought up a good point about session id's. I understood it to an extent...but i didn't clearly get it...could you explain more about that? Also, any resources I could check out regarding changing the url's...

A bot is like a 'guest'. If your 'guests' need to action physically 'click' something to e.g. register, login, drop a cookie to engage tracking, etc. then these pages would all be 'off limits' to search engine bots.

these are normally set in admin/support/cpanel

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

Just to expand on session IDs a bit ...

Session IDs are the strange, and sometimes very long, strings of carachters that some publishing systems put in the URL as a unique identifyer for each visitor to the site. Personally I think it is much smarter, and completely transparent to the users, to keep track of people using cookies, but some systems don't support this and some systems automatically assign session IDs in URLs for users that don't support cookies - and search engine spiders dont, so they get them.

The problem with session IDs is that it will create an unlimited number of URLs pointing to the same content. Everytime the same spider comes back to look at your site it will be presented with new session ID'ed URLs and ultimately end up completely confused. I've seen cases where sites had over 600,000 versions of the same page indexed before the search engine (algoritmically or manually) found out about it and abandoned the site.

So, if you are using session IDs in URLs you have a problem - even if it dosen't show yet. You can be pretty sure it will hit you one day.