The term "search engine safe" was coined in the early search engine days because spiders would skip links with &'s and ?'s when indexing your site. The reason, AFAIK, was because the search engines didn't want to store pages with dynamic content. Thinking it would degrade the accuracy of keyword searches. This became a ridiculous idea as the web matured. Many static pages are generated dynamically and most pages that use query strings are actually creating "static" content. A link to a product description page for example. So to get around this people started writing links like so: http://www.mysite.com/index.cfm/action/something
and then using a filter to convert the link. This fooled the spiders into thinking it's a link to a page with static content. There are plenty of web filters for the various middleware languages that allow your web server to translate that url into the actual url. Things have slowly changed though and the spider bots are starting to allow query strings with more and more attributes. So the value of the web filters and the work involved to code your links like that is degrading rapidly. So in a nutshell, (I just realized that this tangent has not specially answered your question) a search engine safe URL is constituted by having a URL with no query string syntax (& and = and &). -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jake Sent: Friday, December 17, 2004 2:07 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Search Engine Friendly URLs All, What is the consensus on what constitutes a "search engine safe" URL? Would something like: www.mysite.com/index.cfm?action=something or www.mysite.com/index.cfm?action=something&ID=190 be SE safe? Jake ---------------------------------------------------------- To post, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: http://www.dfwcfug.org/form_MemberUnsubscribe.cfm To subscribe: http://www.dfwcfug.org/form_MemberRegistration.cfm ---------------------------------------------------------- To post, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe: http://www.dfwcfug.org/form_MemberUnsubscribe.cfm To subscribe: http://www.dfwcfug.org/form_MemberRegistration.cfm
