> Know it to be true? Nobody "knows" it except the people at Google. Why risk > someone's hunch that's it isn't true? At best what do you gain if you're > right? Save a few hours dev time? And at worst? You lose search engine rank > which can have disastrous effects on a company. To me it's not worth the > risk just to "prove the SEO guys wrong."
Well, this is kind of silly. If you're worried about losing search engine rank, you have to continue doing whatever you've been doing - existing URLs have rank that new URLs won't. Even if you were doing URLs badly, you wouldn't want to simply switch to a better way of doing them as you'd lose the rank you've already achieved unless you're willing to support the old URLs as well. But in any case, you might want to subscribe to Matt Cutts' RSS feed - he covers a lot of this stuff pretty well, and he's at Google. He's discussed URL parameters' safety in searches before, although I didn't bother to Google it today. > And if you think there's no such thing as SEO mojo I think you're been > sipping one too many chi teas. "SEO mojo" is a way for charlatans to make money. There are some well-known, documented facts for SEO (not in any specific order): - content, - logical structure, - unique, readable titles, - readable URLs, - page rank from quality links to your content, - anything that might cause duplicated content (failure to use redirects or canonical URLs with multiple domains, etc) But whenever anybody starts talking about "mojo", without being able to point to clearly definable factors ... well, I call that something else. And I'm exposed to SEO stuff fairly frequently. My company relies on SEO for its training business. When you search for: coldfusion training flash training google search appliance training sencha training html 5 training (although not for html5 training - not sure how we'll deal with that yet!) you'll notice we're in the top 10 results. > Even if you take SEO right out of it, easy to read url's are nicer to look > at, easier to > remember and just plain make sense. Sure, I recommend that to clients all the time. "Cool URIs don't change" http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI But that's a different discussion. If you're going to say that people should use good URLs for unrelated reasons, you don't have to back that up with "true facts about SEO" that aren't actually true. Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software http://www.figleaf.com/ http://training.figleaf.com/ Fig Leaf Software is a Veteran-Owned Small Business (VOSB) on GSA Schedule, and provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized instruction at our training centers, online, or onsite. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Order the Adobe Coldfusion Anthology now! http://www.amazon.com/Adobe-Coldfusion-Anthology/dp/1430272155/?tag=houseoffusion Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/message.cfm/messageid:340550 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/cf-talk/unsubscribe.cfm
