Dynamic vs. static URLs
-
Hello Everyone,
I'm new here on MOZ and just getting back into SEO (a little bit) after not doing anything 'myself' for a couple of years. Currently my individual URLs show as: https://www.example.com/index.php?l=product_detail&p=107 (dynamic responsive site).
I can switch it to a static site, so the individual product pages read as:https://www.example.com/catalog/category name/product name-107.html
It's still a long URL, but it would be keyword rich. Some of my current dynamic pages are indexed,and due to an upgrade I had to do several months back, I already have some redirects (301) from my php extensions to the one listed above. This is my long explanation to my following questions:
-
Does having a dynamic or static site matter when ranking in search engines
-
I already have some redirects coming my older site to this dynamic site, so I would have to make more directs from the dynamic site to my static site - is this okay to do?
I'm really at a loss, a couple of years ago, I ranked 1-3 (on Page 1) on Google for all my keywords, (all White Hat work), and now I'm into great abyss of no mans land of the internet (ranked on Page 3+)
Thank you for any and all help from everyone!
~Sandra
-
-
Thank you to everyone for all of your help and suggestions. I guess this will be on the top of my 'to do list' switching from dynamic to static. I already have some 301's in place from my site had a .php extension to the new extension now with ./?... etc. Is it okay to re redirect them? How many redirects are too many?
Thank you so much!
Sandra
-
Thank you to everyone for all of your help and suggestions. I guess this will be on the top of my 'to do list' switching from dynamic to static. I already have some 301's in place from my site had a .php extension to the new extension now with ./?... etc. Is it okay to re redirect them? How many redirects are too many?
Thank you so much!
Sandra
-
Thank you Hutch42. I guess I have alot of work ahead of me with switching to static and making sure I get all the redirects pointed correctly.
-
Sandra, be very careful with the statement you just made. One of the most dangerous things you can start doing is putting yourself in as a stand in for your customers. Google has seen correlation between search relevance and clean URLs, and when looking at web pages a clean url reinforces a persons want to click on it (page trustworthiness), while a large alpha-numeric string looks worse and is viewed as less trustworthy by the average person.
-
Thank you for the article. I just read it. Some great information. I would love an update to it, since it's from 2008, unless an update is not necessary, if it is still relevant.
So is the consensus, switch to static? (so much work - uugh).
-
I look at the URL. I don't know if it is because I am trained to, or because I copy and paste a lot. Using Dynamic URLs means setting parameters in GWT, it means constantly watching for 404 errors. In my opinion it isn't worth the time and effort where a static URL is implemented once, and you move on with the rest of your page.
-
- Yeah, but do visitors really even look at what is in the URL? I personally don't care (from a shopper's point of view) what URLs say. Am I alone on this thought?
-
Yeah, but do visitors really even look at what is in the URL? I personally don't care (from a shopper's point of view) what URLs say. Am I alone on this thought?
-
Hutch has the best answer here, it needs to be readable by the users. To add to what he said, it is also important to know that the dynamic URLs can and will be crawled, This can lead to errors, specifically overly dynamic URLs and 404 errors. It is good if you can keep them clean, but that is difficult. I prefer to use static URLs because I can control them and optimize my pages better.
-
Hi there,
Rand did write an article on this very topic a few years ago. While the content is a bit dated, it is still relevant. Take a look here:
http://moz.com/blog/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls-the-best-practice-for-seo-is-still-clear
Hope this helps!
-
The question is not dynamic v. static, it should be what is most readable for your visitors. If you can simplify your urls for visitors then you should as it makes the experience better, which in turn is what Google wants websites to do.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
URL Parameters as pagination
Hi guys, due to some changes to our category pages our paginated urls will change so they will look like this: ...category/bagger/2?q=Bagger&startDate=26.06.2017&endDate=27.06.2017 You see they include a query parameter as well as a start and end date which will change daily. All URLs with pagination are on noindex/follow. I am worrying that the products which are linked from the category pages will not get crawled well when the URLs on which they are linked from change on a daily basis. Do you have some experience with this? Are there other things we need to worry about with these pagination URLs? cheers
Technical SEO | | JKMarketing0 -
Why put rel=canonical to the same url ?
Hi all. I've heard that it's good to put the link rel canonical in your header even when there is no other important or prefered version of that url. If you take a look at moz.com and see the code, you'll see that they put the <link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="http://moz.com" /> ... pointing at the same url ! But if you go to http://moz.com/products/pricing for example, they have no canonical there ! WHY ? Thanks in advance !
Technical SEO | | Tintanus0 -
XML Sitemap and unwanted URL parameters
We currently don't have an XML sitemap for our site. I generated one using Screaming Frog and it looks ok, but it also contains my tracking url parameters (ref=), which I don't want Google to use, as specified in GWT. Cleaning it will require time and effort which I currently don't have. I also think that having one could help us on Bing. So my question is: Is it better to submit a "so-so" sitemap than having none at all, or the risks are just too high? Could you explain what could go wrong? Thanks !
Technical SEO | | jfmonfette0 -
Www vs no-www duplicate fix?
Hi all, I have more or less published two versions of our site. One on "www" and one without. And of course we uncovered it during our SEO crawl as "duplicate" content/titles. My guess (hope) is this is something that can be easily fixed on the server side, but I don't have a lot of knowledge around it. Does anyone know?
Technical SEO | | Becky_Converge0 -
Single URL not indexed
Hi everyone! Some days ago, I noticed that one of our URLs (http://www.access.de/karriereplanung/webinare) is no longer in the Google index. We never had any form of penalty, link warning etc. Our traffic by Google is constantly growing every month. This single page does not have an external link pointing to it - only internal links. The page has been indexed all the time. The HTTP status code is 200, there is no noindex or something in the code. I submitted the URL on GWMT to let Google send it to the index. It was crawled successfully by Google, sent to the index 5 days ago - nothing happened, still not indexed. Do you have any suggestions why this page is no longer indexed? It is well linked internally and one click away from the home page. There is still the PR of 5 showing, I always thought that pages with PR are indexed.......
Technical SEO | | accessKellyOCG0 -
Canonical URL
I previously set the canonical Url in google web masters to the non www version, when I check my on page opt, it tells me that I have a critical issue with this. Should I change it in google web masters back to the www version? if so is there the possibility of negative results? Or is there a better way to deal with this? Note, I have inbound links pointing to both types.
Technical SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Cyrillic letter in URL - Encoding
Hi all We are launching our site in Russia. As far as I can see by searching Google all sites have URLs in latin letters. Is there a special reason for this? - It seems that cyrillic letters also work. My technical staff says that it might give some encoding problems. Can anyone give me some insight into this? Thanks in advance.. / Kenneth
Technical SEO | | Kennethskonto0 -
Slashes In Url's
If your cms has created two urls for the same piece of content that look like the following, www.domianname.com/stores and www.domianname.com/stores/, will this be seen as duplicate content by google? Your tools seem to pick it up as errors. Does one of the urls need 301 to the other to clear this up, or is it not a major problem? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | gregster10000