Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Greetings, I have read a lot about static vs dynamic URL`s. As I understand it, search engines rate static URL`s higher than dynamic. I know that the code must be written to my .htaccess file to convert the dynamic to static looking. My website produces dynamic URL`s and is database driven.

 Do I understand this correctly? Do search engines rate static URL`s higher than dynamic? Is the difference worthwhile?

 I need all the help I can get.

Steve Lewis
http://www.lewishobbies.com

I don`t think it`s so much a matter of ranking them higher .... basically, it used to be that after 3 or 4 variables in the url, the spiders just couldn`t/wouldn`t deal with them .... rewritten url`s eliminate that problem, as well as look much better for your users .... but, setting up the htaccess part of it can be tricky.

In a nutshell, if the original dynamic url looked like this:

www.somesite.tld/product.php?id=456&name=widget&color=blue&size=large

You could rewrite it to look like this:

www.somesite.tld/Product/456/widget/blue/large

Your site links would need to point to the rewritten url, not the dynamic one, and then in your htaccess file you need to place the rewrite rule. There are many tutorials and htaccess generators online to show you the code you would need for this.




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M Hall
Website Critique Community
International Society of Curmudgeons

Hi all,

Its not as much that search engines don`t like dynamic URLs, its just in the past that most of them were unreadable.  Even now, if you have two many variables they won`t get read properly.  Your best bet is to create a URL rewrite that incorporates a keyword into the URL so that it will give you a boost for ranking for the terms you are targeting on that page.



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