Rewriting URLs

Hi, I've been reading a few tutorials and I understand this can be abit dangerous but I wish to optimize my urls for search engines. Basically my site has a category system which support unlimited sub categories. Within the categories are products for the site. Here's a few suggestions I've come up with so far:

Category Pages:
1. /products/cat1-title/cat2-title/cat-id/ (with or without the trailing /)
2. /products/cat-id/ (with or without the trailing /)
3. /products/cat2-title/cat-id/ (with or without the trailing /)

Product Pages:
1. /products/cat1/cat2/product/product-title/product-id/ (with or without the trailing /) - the reason for the word product is to distinguish between category pages or product pages (method 4 removes this by using a different folder name)
2. /products/product/product-id/ (with or without the trailing /) - again the reason for the word product is to distinguish between category pages or product pages (method 5 removes this by using a different folder name)
3. /products/cat2-title/product/product-id/ (with or without the trailing /)
4. /product/product-title/product-id/ (with or without the trailing /)
5. /product/product-id/ (with or without the trailing /)

I could go on but would appreciate your feedback on which method is best to use. I have put forward some suggestions but what is the best way to do it for both category and product pages. The key points I would be looking to achieve:

- most importantly i guess search engine friendly
- consistent and friendly to the eye so you can distinguish what you're looking at from the url

My second objective means that method 2 would not be best as it does not contain the title in the url. I've read mixed opinions on using the title in the url as when you edit the title of the product the url changes. However the url will still work as I would distinguish the page by the product id but would this be a problem with search engine rankings.

I understand that method one may produce a long url and this can ruin your rankings.

Also does the ending trailing slash matters (if I allow it both to be there and not to be there, does this mean the search engine may rank it twice and can this become messy).

Would really appreciate your help on this as I want to get it right now rather than be sorry later. Cheers

Titles increase the relative words in the URL which in turn can increase ranking. I believe Dev Shed has recently made this switch from something similar to your fifth method where it used to just be the thread id (eg /t314843/s.html), but now it contains the forum and thread title as well (see address bar).

I personally don't care what my URL looks like to the user, so I wouldn't even consider that part. As for the best in terms of SEO, I would say a good combination of item keywords w/o having the URL get too long (whatever length that may be), which could become a problem with unlimited category depths.

While is is better to get the keywords in the URL's, there are also other things to watch. In some examples you've gone into a pretty deep directory structure, and this can cause a few problems. From what I've seen it's recommended that directories should go no more then 2 deep or they'll risk the SE's thinking that these are spamming keywords into the URL's. So, something like http://www.domain.com/category/product/idnum.htm whoudl be fine, but don't keep going with sub-categories in the URL as well, you might be asking for trouble.

i m also suffering problem in [URL=http://www.programmersbank.comhttp://www.programmersbank.com[/URL], when after rewrit URL


RewriteRule ^index\.html$ /index\.php


RewriteRule ^scriptdetails/(.*)/(.*).html /scriptdetails.php?cat=$1&id=$2


on index page when i click any link http://www.programmersbank.com/scriptdatails/php/2.html, i can read this page but when i click on index.html, the link treats as:
http://www.programmersbank.com/scriptdatails/php/index.html
anyone can help me?

Please create a new thread next time.

Solution