Dynamic URLs Appearing on Google Page 1\. Convert to Static URLs or not?
-
Hi,
I have a client who uses dynamic URLs thoughout his site. For SEO purposes, I've advised him to convert dynamic URLs to static URLs whenever possible.
However, the client has a few dynamic URLs that are appearing on Google Page 1 for strategically valuable keywords. For these URLs, is it still worth it to 301 them to static URLs? In this case, what are the potential benefits and/or pitfalls?
-
Thanks for the advise. The website name is Teachervoice.com. The site appears at #9 in Google results for the term 'elementary school teacher interview questions'. (#7 for high school teacher interview questions)
URL looks like this: http://teachervoice.com/ReviewStream.aspx?ios=1&lg=11&hg=13
Change it to static or leave it as-is?
-
I agree with Marie but I will add one twist.
You mentioned the pages are ranking on page 1 of Google. More information is needed. Are they ranking as #1? or #10? What are the client's goals?
If a client is not presently #1 but is focused on earning the #1 spot, then I would go through and perform even minor tweaks to the page such as correcting the URL. I am probably in the minority on this topic.
Keep in mind URL weight for ranking is very low. The primary value comes whenever a user uses the URL as a link to the site. If you find your site's visitors copy and paste the links into forums or other articles, then the importance of solid URLs increases.
-
I think you may need to provide more information about the dynamic urls. In my opinion, if you have something like,
www.example.com/testpage.php?id=3
then that's fine,
but if you have:
then that's not good.
With that being said, if the pages are ranking well, why change them?
It might also be a situation where you need a rel canonical. So, for example, if you had two pages that were the same that were ranking such as:
www.example.com/testpage.php?id=1
along with
www.example.com/testpage.php?id=1&productcode=4
then you'd want to rel canonical the pages to the appropriate one.
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
-
Does rewriting a URL affect the page authority?
Hi all, I recently optimized an overview page for a car rental website. Because the page didn’t rank very well, I rewrote the URL, putting the exact keyword combination in it. Then I asked Google to re-crawl the URL through Search Console. This afternoon, I checked Open Site Explorer and saw that the Page Authority had decreased to 1, while the subpages still have an authority of about 18-20. Hence my question: is rewriting a URL a bad idea for SEO? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | LiseDE
Lise0 -
Google serving wrong page...
Hi, When you Google: "Los Angeles divorce attorney", you will see this site on the 5th page of the SERPS: www.berenjifamilylaw.com/blog/. For some reason, Google is serving the BLOG page as opposed to the homepage. This has been going on now for several weeks. Any tips on how to fix this? Obviously, the Homepage is more relevant and has more links going to it, so not sure why it's happening. Would you just leave it alone? Would you use robots.txt to block Google from crawling the BLOG post page? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
Google is indexing the wrong pages
I have been having problems with Google indexing my website since mid May. I haven't made any changes to my website which is wordpress. I have a page with the title 'Peterborough Cathedral wedding', I search Google for 'wedding Peteborough Cathedral', this is not a competitive search phrase and I'd expect to find my blog post on page one. Instead, half way down page 4 I find Google has indexed www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk/blog with the title 'wedding photojournalist | Portfolio', what google has indexed is a link to the blog post and not the blog post itself. I repeated this for several other blog posts and keywords and found similar results, most of which don't make any sense at all - A search for 'Menorca wedding photography' used to bring up one of my posts at the top of page one. Now it brings up a post titled 'La Mare wedding photography Jersey" which happens to have a link to the Menorca post at the bottom of the page. A search for 'Broadoaks country house weddng photography' brings up 'weddingphotojournalist | portfolio' which has a link to the Broadoaks post. a search for 'Blake Hall wedding photography' does exactly the same. In this case Google is linking to www.weddingphotojournalist.blog again, this is a page of recent blog posts. Could this be a problem with my sitemap? Or the Yoast SEO plugin? or a problem with my wordpress theme? Or is Google just a bit confused?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | weddingphotojournalist0 -
2 pages lost page rank and not showing any backlinks in google
Hi we have a business/service related website, 2 of our main pages lost their page rank from 3 to 0 and are not showing any backlinks in google. What could be the possible reason. Please guide me.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tech_Ahead0 -
Where to put a page ID in a URL?
Hello, My company is going to change URLs to example.com/category or example.com/product. When we will change the URLs to product or category pages somehow we have to check whether the requested page is from category table in DB or from products table (this gives much speed to page load time). So we have to choose how to make the different product and category pages.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | komeksimas
Programmers said that we need to insert id to URL. So the question is: Which is the better way to place an id to an URL? example.com/product-name?id=111 example.com/product-name/111 example.com/product_name-111 Or maybe we should use some other punctuation mark to separate id from product name? p.s. I have read Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs by Google and it still didn't answered which is the best for all of the pages. Somehow others solve this problem by typing only the names to the URL, but could anyone tell what that technology should be?0 -
Who does google require a 3 digit number for news URLs?
Here, google mentions that article URLs should contain a 3 digit number: http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=68323 Why is this? Also, do you think it is good to have both a news sitemap and 3 digits at the end of a URL? Or, will one do?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Rewriting dynamic urls to static
We're currently working on an SEO project for http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/. After a crawl of their site, tons of duplicate content issues came up. We think this is largely down to the use of their brand filtering system, which works like this: By clicking on a brand, the site generates a url with the brand keywords in, for example: http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-cid77.html filtered by the brand Mammut becomes: http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-Mammut-cid77.html?filter_brand=48 This was done by a previous SEO agency in order to prevent duplicate content. We suspect that this has made the issue worse though, as by removing the dynamic string from the end of the URL, the same content is displayed as the unfiltered page. For example http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-Mammut-cid77.html shows the same content as: http://www.gear-zone.co.uk/3-season-synthetic-cid77.html Now, if we're right in thinking that Google is unlikely to the crawl the dynamic filter, this would seem to be the root of the duplicate issue. If this is the case, would rewriting the dynamic URLs to static on the server side be the best fix? It's a Windows Server/asp site. I hope that's clear! It's a pretty tricky issue and it would be good to know your thoughts. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | neooptic0 -
How Google Carwler Cached Orphan pages and directory?
I have website www.test.com I have made some changes in live website and upload it to "demo" directory (which is recently created) for client approval. Now, my demo link will be www.test.com/demo/ I am not doing any type of link building or any activity which pass referral link to www.test.com/demo/ Then how Google crawler find it and cached some pages or entire directory? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | darshit210