How much do pretty URLs matter?
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With the various problems I've read about enabling pretty URLs, especially on Dreamhost where I'll be setting up a site soon, I was wondering if anyone has left pretty URLs turned off and if that worked out okay with search engine indexing. I can understand the [/index.php?cid=123] style URLs causing problems, because the question mark signifies a query string. However, concrete5's standard URLs now don't have a query string section: [/index.php/some-page]. The "index.php" just looks like an odd directory name.
Anyone have experience leaving pretty URLs turned off? If it turned out okay, I might just go that route and save myself some trouble.
Anyone have experience leaving pretty URLs turned off? If it turned out okay, I might just go that route and save myself some trouble.
I don't know the answer to your question but I use pretty urls on dreamhost and they seem to work just fine for me. The only thing is you can't use fast cgi with your domain setup. They work perfectly right out of the box, apart from that.
To give some added detail about the problem with pretty urls and FastCGI, see this DreamHost wiki page:
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Mod_rewrite...
Scroll down that page until you see the heading "No Input File Specified".
Basically, from what I've read, any provider using Apache 2.2 and FastCGI version of PHP 5.2 suffers from problems with using Pretty URLs in Concrete.
I had the "No Input File Specified" problems with Godaddy, and of course they don't give you the option of changing which version of PHP you can use. I tried out DreamHost, changed the version of PHP from FastCGI to plain CGI, and that did the trick for me.
Hope this helps anyone else who might be searching as I did. :)
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Mod_rewrite...
Scroll down that page until you see the heading "No Input File Specified".
Basically, from what I've read, any provider using Apache 2.2 and FastCGI version of PHP 5.2 suffers from problems with using Pretty URLs in Concrete.
I had the "No Input File Specified" problems with Godaddy, and of course they don't give you the option of changing which version of PHP you can use. I tried out DreamHost, changed the version of PHP from FastCGI to plain CGI, and that did the trick for me.
Hope this helps anyone else who might be searching as I did. :)
Works for me but I am on Zen internet.
Pretty URL's are very important for SEO.
Pretty URL's are very important for SEO.
I am not an SEO expert, so this is just a complete guess...
My understanding of why pretty URL's are important to SEO is because it is the one and only piece of data that you can't stuff with infinite amounts of words. Because of this forced shortness (a url can only be so long), it requires people to really make it as accurate as possible, and not just fill it with every word in the dictionary (like you could do with the meta tags and the page content).
So going along that logic, I'd imagine that using the /index.php/my-page-name style would not hurt SEO too much, because you're still getting the important words in there. They are slightly "diluted" by the "/index.php/" portion of the address, so maybe it's slightly less effective, but certainly it is *much* better than /index.php?cID=76.
Really though the most important thing is to have good content that other people (whom google respects) link to. All of the url / meta-keywords / h1-tag / etc. stuff helps a little but pales in comparison to having good quality content that other people link to. Easier said than done of course :)
BTW, found this discussion on wordpress forum which pretty much says the same thing (but neither me nor the posters over there really know what we're talking about when it comes to SEO, so take all this with a grain of salt):http://wordpress.org/support/topic/permalinks-does-indexphp-hurt-se...
My understanding of why pretty URL's are important to SEO is because it is the one and only piece of data that you can't stuff with infinite amounts of words. Because of this forced shortness (a url can only be so long), it requires people to really make it as accurate as possible, and not just fill it with every word in the dictionary (like you could do with the meta tags and the page content).
So going along that logic, I'd imagine that using the /index.php/my-page-name style would not hurt SEO too much, because you're still getting the important words in there. They are slightly "diluted" by the "/index.php/" portion of the address, so maybe it's slightly less effective, but certainly it is *much* better than /index.php?cID=76.
Really though the most important thing is to have good content that other people (whom google respects) link to. All of the url / meta-keywords / h1-tag / etc. stuff helps a little but pales in comparison to having good quality content that other people link to. Easier said than done of course :)
BTW, found this discussion on wordpress forum which pretty much says the same thing (but neither me nor the posters over there really know what we're talking about when it comes to SEO, so take all this with a grain of salt):http://wordpress.org/support/topic/permalinks-does-indexphp-hurt-se...
Your spot on Jordan.
The URL names are very critical towards the many aspects of SEO. We do a lot of SEO for clients and this is one of the aspects we look at.
Searching on Google I found this:
http://www.impliedbydesign.com/articles/three-search-engine-optimiz...
These are good tips.
The URL names are very critical towards the many aspects of SEO. We do a lot of SEO for clients and this is one of the aspects we look at.
Searching on Google I found this:
http://www.impliedbydesign.com/articles/three-search-engine-optimiz...
These are good tips.
Just my 2 satang-I'm no expert, but have done a lot of SEO optimizations to get my sites in the rankings.
I think pretty urls are more about security than SEO. Choosing a relevant URL to your search keywords is more important to search rankings. The algorithms are closely guarded secrets and change often. But from my experience the format of a URL makes little difference to the position in a search result. If it does make a difference. then it will be a fraction of the impact of, say, choosing good keywords as to make no difference.
Many years ago it was important because the search engine technology couldn't parse URLS with weird and wonderful variables after the urls-so they didn't. They just ignored them (that does hurt). Now, however, they are are so good we have to tell them what NOT to process. You can even have an address in hex and other notations (http://www.pc-help.org/obscure.htm) which are all valid addresses. It only serves to fool humans. Not search engines as they will quite happily index them and I ran experiment a while back that convinced me that a web-page had exactly the same position with or without obfuscation.
Not having pretty urls, however, means that the underlying server language is exposed in the address bar and, more importantly, the address bar is a direct method of imputing variables into that particular script. This can expose weaknesses in a badly coded script, so it is better to create a processing layer that must be navigated so that the address can be sanitized.
......addendum. several coffees later....
Apparently 4 is considered the acceptable number of variables that most spiders can cope with without choking. Not quite as good as I thought/hoped. So I think it makes no difference to SEO as long as you have <4 variables.
I think pretty urls are more about security than SEO. Choosing a relevant URL to your search keywords is more important to search rankings. The algorithms are closely guarded secrets and change often. But from my experience the format of a URL makes little difference to the position in a search result. If it does make a difference. then it will be a fraction of the impact of, say, choosing good keywords as to make no difference.
Many years ago it was important because the search engine technology couldn't parse URLS with weird and wonderful variables after the urls-so they didn't. They just ignored them (that does hurt). Now, however, they are are so good we have to tell them what NOT to process. You can even have an address in hex and other notations (http://www.pc-help.org/obscure.htm) which are all valid addresses. It only serves to fool humans. Not search engines as they will quite happily index them and I ran experiment a while back that convinced me that a web-page had exactly the same position with or without obfuscation.
Not having pretty urls, however, means that the underlying server language is exposed in the address bar and, more importantly, the address bar is a direct method of imputing variables into that particular script. This can expose weaknesses in a badly coded script, so it is better to create a processing layer that must be navigated so that the address can be sanitized.
......addendum. several coffees later....
Apparently 4 is considered the acceptable number of variables that most spiders can cope with without choking. Not quite as good as I thought/hoped. So I think it makes no difference to SEO as long as you have <4 variables.
