Using a query string for linked, static landing pages - is this good practice?
-
My company has a page with links for each of our dozen office locations as well as a clickable map. These offices are also linked in the footer of every page along with their phone number.
When one of these links is clicked, the visitor is directed to a static page with a picture of the office, contact information, a short description, and some other information. The URL for these pages is displayed as something like http:/example.com/offices.htm?office_id=123456, with seemingly random ID numbers at the end depending on the office that remain static. I know first off that this is probably bad SEO practice, as the URL should be something like htttp://example.com/offices/springfield/
My question is, why is there a question mark in the page URL? I understand that it represents a query string, but I'm not sure why it's there to begin with. A search query should not required if they are just static landing pages, correct?. Is there any reason at all why they would be queries? Is this an issue that needs to be addressed or does it have little to no impact on SEO?
-
Hey!
What's happening here is your website is loading a single offices.htm page and showing different data within that page depending upon the ID of the office selected. It's basically using the page as a template and filling in the blanks dependant upon the query.
The reason for it being there is simply because that is how your developer/agency has built your website. I would not recommend using this method in this instance as each office would be best suited to a unique page of their own as you've already mentioned.
For a better understanding of why it has been built in this manner I'd recommend talking to your developer.
Hope you found this useful.
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
-
How is Single Page Application (SPA) bad for SEO
Hi guys. I am quite inspired of SPA technique. It's really amazing when all your interaction with the site is going on the fly and you don't see any page reloads. I've started implementing the site with this instruction and already found nice guys to make the design. The only downside of the using SPA which I can see **is the **SEO part. That's because the URL does not really change and different pages don't have their unique URL addresses.
Web Design | | Billy_gym
Actually they have, but it looks like: yoursite.com/#/products yoursite.com/#/prices yoursite.com/#/contact So all of them goes after # and being just anchors. For Google this mean all of these pages is just yoursite.com/ My question is what is really proven method to implement the URL structure in Single Page Application, so all the pages indexed by Google correctly (sorry I don't mention the other search engines because of market share). The other question, of course, is examples. It will be great to see real life site examples, better authority sites, which use SPA technique and well indexed by search engines.1 -
Toggle Tabs on pages - How to present information to users
Hi all, I can use some help with SEO/UX related question I have got. I have a client who has some toggel tabs on its website. Is there a way to display the relevant information from these toggle tabs when a user lands on the page instead of having the same toggle tab show for whenever a user reaches the page? What I am trying to understand is that if a user searched for "vitamin C benefit" (lets say) in Google and then clicks on the link, the user is presented with the "benefits" tab on the page instead of "side effects" tab. Any help would be appreciated! Thanks
Web Design | | Malika1
Malika0 -
What do you use for test rendering your dev site?
I'm redesigning our company ecommerce site and need to test render an infinite scroller to ensure that it is as SEO friendly as possible. My problem is that I cannot view it in Webmaster Tools since I am blocking the site from crawlers using robots.txt. I know I could simply unblock Google temporarily but I really would rather not make my dev site available to search engine crawlers.
Web Design | | bearpaw0 -
Can external links in a menu attract a penalty?
We have some instances of external links (i.e. pointing to another domain) in site menus. Although there are legitimate reasons (e.g. linking to a news archive kept on a separate domain) I understand this can be considered bad from a usability perspective. This begs the question - is this bad for SEO? With the recent panda changes we've seen certain issues which were previously "only" about usability attract SEO penalties, but I can't find any references to this example. Anyone have thoughts / experience?
Web Design | | SOS_Children0 -
Is anyone using Humans.txt in your websites? What do you think?
http://humanstxt.org Anyone using this on their websites and if so have you seen and positive benefits of doing so? Would be good to see some examples of sites using it and potentially how you're using the files. I'm considering adding this to my checklist for launching sites
Web Design | | eseyo1 -
Site Ranks on Page 1 - Would launching new site hurt that
Hello, I currently have a website ranking in the top 7 for my main keyword. The website was built in 2004 and is definitely outdated, yet still ranks very high and brings in business. If i launched a new site on this domain, what would happen to my rankings? Would they drop? would they rise? If i don't launch the new site, will this site eventually drop due to being old and outdated? Any advice would be helpful...
Web Design | | Prime850 -
How serious is duplicate page content?
We just launched our site on a new platform - Magento Enterprise. We have a wholesale catalog and and retail catalog. We have up to 3 domains pointing to each product. We are getting tons of duplicate content errors. What are the best practices for dealing with this? Here is an example: mysite.com/product.html mysite.com/category/product.html mysite.com/dynamic-url
Web Design | | devonkrusich0 -
Dynamic pages and code within content
Hi all, I'm considering creating a dynamic table on my site that highlights rows / columns and cells depending on buttons that users can click. Each cell in the table links to a separate page that is created dynamically pulling information from a database. Now I'm aware of the google guidelines: "If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a "?" character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few." So we wondered whether we could put the dynamic pages in our sitemap so that google could index them - the pages can be seen with javascript off which is how the pages are manipulated to make them dynamic. Could anyone give us a overview of the dangers here? I also wondered if you still need to separate content from code on a page? My developer still seems very keen to use inline CSS and javascript! Thanks a bundle.
Web Design | | tgraham0