Static looking URL - Best practices?
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We are about to modify the structure of our dynamic URLs and I wonder what the latest and greatest is in terms of SEO-friendly dynamic URLs.
Our thinking so far is to do something like:
that is, using + to separate search parameters and hyphens to separate words
An example might be
I'm not an SEO expert so any help would be appreciated
Thanks
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Really, I think people have gotten themselves all twisted up unnecessarily over dynamic URLs and hiding the fact that they're dynamic.
If you're dealing with a URL that really is dynamic, I'd stick with the ? & = notation that's pretty standard for this sort of thing. In my experience, Google is seeing ANY of those characters as word separators, and I'm not really seeing any downside in terms of ranking for terms when using those terms as traditional parameters, e.g.
I'd be careful with using a "+" sign if you go that route, as various conversions from text to URL-safe to HTML-encoded etc. will replace spaces with + signs...and if something is un-encoding that, you might end up with spaces there.
FYI where this all came from was URLs like this:
www.homes.com/showproperty.asp?pid=115235423
ion=ABX&type=723In THAT case, those numeric parameters (which tend to be database record identifiers) are NOT of use to Google in terms of relevance or ranking. But the english parameters in my example further up ARE useful, as they may match some of the query terms.
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