URL vars and SEO

Hi,

Does passing variables in the URL screw with SEO at all?

Yes!

First of all google is the only search engine that will allow it's bots to crawl a page with one var attached to the URL. But not 2 vars

google will crawl this page in some circumstance, YAHOO, MSN won't

http://somepage.php?var=foo

no robots will get this one

http://somepage.php?var=foo&id=yes

if you have access to your server look into apaches lookback feature. It is by far the easiest to use. Most shared hosting won't allow you to use this though.

If you are on a shared service you need mod_rewrite... Find out from your provider about how it is configured (if at all), how you can manipulate that configuration, and then adjust your scripts accordingly. Verio for instance allows you to adjust your .htaccess file so that you can put in your own regex for mod_rewrite

I hate to say it, but this is simply not true. I have a couple of sites that I've built in PHP with URL variables, and they are indexed fine by all three of the SE's.

There are limits to what you can do though. It's recommended that you don't use more then 2 variables because these can confuse the bots sometimes.

The main thing to avoid at all costs is using a URL variable with the name of "id" or "cid" or "sid" or something similar, as SE's will see this as a session variable, and then won't take much notice of indexing the page.

Using URL variables still works fine when you do them right, and there's a LOT of big sites out there in the SERP's that prove it.

Google WILL 'save' index.php?page=X&id=98&post=732 but will only assign a PR to this if there is an abundance of linkage towards this link from external websites.