Dynamic page
-
I have few pages on my site that are with this nature
/locator/find?radius=60&zip=&state=FL
I read at Google webmaster that they suggest not to change URL's like this
"According to Google's Blog (link below) they are able to crawl the simplified dynamic URL just fine, and it is even encouraged to use a simple dynamic URL ( " It's much safer to serve us the original dynamic URL and let us handle the problem of detecting and avoiding problematic parameters. " )
_http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html _It can also actually lead to a decrease as per this line: " We might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URLs if you try to make your urls look static and in the process hide parameters which offer the Googlebot valuable information. "The URLs are already simplified without any extra parameters, which is the recommended structure from Google:"Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That's our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems"I would love to get some opinions on this also please consider that those pages are not cached by Google for some reason.
-
I think this is an answer that goes beyond Google. We use rewrites extensively and do not have any problems. There are some caveats
- Regarding GoogleBot missing information, you just need to make sure that the new URL has all the info.
Lets say you are a plumbing portal and use
/locator/find?radius=60&zip=&state=FL
rewrite to
/plumbers/florida-fl/miami/33110/
Your search radius can be a default value vs having to put it in as a parameter.
It helps with site structure to think of things as how they would be as a static directory. In this case, you are actually giving more information to GoogleBot with the rewritten URL vs the old one as you have included who you are searching for (a plumber) the city (miami), state (fl) and zip code (33110). The previous URL only indicated the state. If you dont like using all the folders, you can simply have a longer file name with dashes in between the words.
-
If you use rewrites, make sure Google is not spidering the original URLs otherwise you get penalized for duplicate errors. Monitoring Webmaster Tools or using spider software will help you find the holes. You can then use things like Canonical Links and Noindex Tags to get the old URLs out of the index and make sure Google has the correct pages. This all depends on how you implement your rewrites.
-
If you take some time to look at how you want to organized your site to start with then the first two items will take care of themselves usually. A good exercise is to write down how all of this would work within a breadcrumb navigation. This forces you to get organized and also helps you setup how you want all your pages to be shown to Google. If you do start to add parameters on top of this basic structure like pagination or other sortable options, you need to think how you would noindex, follow those pages to make sure that your main page would rank for a given key phrase vs all the other sorted versions of the same page.
-
One thing that is overlooked in setting up this kind of structure is that you can use it to your advantage in your analytic tools to look at global trends to your site. This could be in any site. Using the example above, all US states are at the 2nd level directory, cities are 3rd and zip is 4th. Makes it really super easy to use a regexp on urls to group them. For example, you could setup a filter in you analytics to easily combine all sessions that looked at pages in Florida and wanted to see what the next action was.
Cheers!
-
Hi,
I think that this does not mean, that you have to avoid rewriting dynamic urls at all but take care of the accessibility of your information.
for your url it could be interesting to build your domain like:
/locator/florida/find?radius=60
/locator/24786/find?radius=60or even better:
/stores-near-florida/find?range=60 /stores-near-24786/find?range=60
the suggestion of google just sais, that you have to avoid that information is being lost by mapping your dynamic url to a static. you should leave the radius parameter in the url because google could vary this parameter.
-
correction the pages are found by Google
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
-
Canonical Page Question
Hi, I have a question relation to Canonical pages That i need clearing up. I am not sure that my bigcommere website is correctly configured and just wanted clarification from someone in the know. Take this page for example https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/ Canonical link is https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/ The Rel="next" link is https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/?sort=bestselling&page=2 and this page has a canonical tag as rel='canonical' href='https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/?page=2' /> Is this correct as above and working as it should or should the canonical tag for the second (pagination page) https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/?page=2 in our source code be saying rel='canonical' href='https://www.fishingtackleshop.com.au/barra-lures/' />
Technical SEO | | oceanstorm0 -
Removed Product page on our website, what to do
We just removed an entire product category on our website, (product pages still exist, but will be removed soon as well) Should we be setting up re-directs, or can we simply delete this category and product
Technical SEO | | DutchG
pages and do nothing? We just received this in Google Webmasters tools: Google detected a significant increase in the number of URLs that return a 404 (Page Not Found) error. We have not updated the sitemap yet...Would this be enough to do or should we do more? You can view our website here: http://tinyurl.com/6la8 We removed the entire "Spring Planted Category"0 -
Delete indexed spam pages
Hi everyone, I'm hoping someone had this same situation, or may know of a solution. One of our sites was recently pharmahacked 😞 We found an entire pharmaceutical site in one of the folder of our site. We were able to delete it, but now Google is showing us on not found error for those pages we deleted. First, I guess the question is will this harm us? If so, anyway we can fix this? Obliviously we don't want to do a 303 redirect for spam pages. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Bridge_Education_Group0 -
Is the Authority of Individual Pages Diluted When You Add New Pages?
I was wondering if the authority of individual pages is diluted when you add new pages (in Google's view). Suppose your site had 100 pages and you added 100 new pages (without getting any new links). Would the average authority of the original pages significantly decrease and result in a drop in search traffic to the original pages? Do you worry that adding more pages will hurt pages that were previously published?
Technical SEO | | Charlessipe0 -
Micro-sites for Landing Pages?
We are working with a site that is difficult at best to update. The client intends to re-do the site in 18 months or so but needs to start generating more traffic (and sales) now. What are thoughts on creating landing pages as micro-sites that point to the current site conversion page as a stop gap? Beyond not sharing authority is there any known penalty? By the way they don't have tremendous ranking right now - often bottom of page two - and the micro-site won't duplicate any content.
Technical SEO | | InformaticsInc0 -
Too many on page links
Hi All, As we all know, having to much links on a page is an obstacle for search engine crawlers in terms of the crawl allowance. My category pages are labeled as pages with to many "one page" links by the SEOmoz crawler. This probably comes from the fact that each product on the category page has multiple links (on the image and model number). Now my question is, would it help to setup a text-link with a clickable area as big as the product area? This means every product gets just one link. Would this help get the crawlers deeper in these pages and distribute the link-juice better? Or is Google smart enough already to figure out that two links to the same product page shouldn't be counted as two? Thanks for your replies guys. Rich
Technical SEO | | Horlogeboetiek0 -
Duplicate Page Titles and Content
I have a site that has a lot of contact modules. So basically each section/page has a contact person and when you click the contact button it brings up a new window with form to submit and then ends with a thank you page. All of the contact and thank you pages are showing up as duplicate page titles and content. Is this something that needs to be fixed even if I am not using them to target keywords?
Technical SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
How do doorway page penalties work?
In case of a doorway page penalty, are both the doorway page and the external domain affected?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0