Help: Will the use of (?) after .html files affect ranking?

[ashvin]

Hello everybody :),

Since a clients site contain more than 20K pure and to a large part hand-written html files, will the use of (?) sign affect their search engine positionings?

eg: http://www.site.com/?homepage
eg: http://www.site.com/category1/index.html?homepage
eg: http://www.site.com/category2/index.html?homepage
eg: http://www.site.com/category3/index.html?category1
etc...

I really need to include (?) after each page for offline log tracking purposes.

Thank you :)
Ashvin

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

If all the various URLs lead to the exact same content page then you WILL run into serious problems with this. There is no way for a search engine to know which URL is the right one to index. Also, some users link link to one version of the page and others to another giving you less focused linkpop


I must say, this is not the right way to setup tracking. If you only use the parameters for tracking I would redirect those URLs (with a 301) to the "raw" URL so everyone ends up on that one no matter how they got there. This is a very simple solution and it works.

[ashvin]

Oh I See,

If this can in a way trouble the search engines then this deserves a second thought indeed...but i'm still a bit skeptical

Is there another way sysmbol I can use instead of (?)

Also, this site has more then 20 categories and each category has at least 500 pages in.

eg: http://site.com/articles/?string:comes_from_homepage (...) like 500 pages in the category "articles" will have this dynamic url at the end..

eg: http://site.com/tips/?string:comes_from_articles_section

I believe since so many internal pages are linked the same way in one category and another way, with a different set of words after the (?) in another category, this won't be a problem for the important search engines like yahoo, msn and google to know which pages to be indexed...of course...I'm assuming all this!

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

I am sorry but I am not sure what you mean.

I think you need to go back to square one, so to speak, and truely understand what the ?-mark does and why it is used on your website.

The goal is to create a structure on your webisite where each unique URL only show unique content. That includes every carachter in the URL - the total string.

[ashvin]

Ok,

here is a live example: http://www.wilsonweb.com

Notice how dynamic tracking pointers like ?greenbar, ?homepage, ?rightebook etc are beling used to help the webmaster track visitors.

As you can see, each page has unique content, and, to a big extent, unique URLs. But all those pages also have the same links (can contain for example ?greenbar) inside.

This ?greenbar can sometimes be present in more than 500 pages (with unique content and urls). ALL 500 pages that contain this pointer are unique in content and point to the exact same page...while those pages also have dozens of other pointers like ?nav, ?footer, ?top ..etc that also can also point to the same page or another page...depending on my tracking needs.

Gee...hope I was clear enough :D

[seomike]

I don't think it will hurt a thing. ;)