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
-
Indexing Issue of Dynamic Pages
Hi All, I have a query for which i am struggling to find out the answer. I unable to retrieve URL using "site:" query on Google SERP. However, when i enter the direct URL or with "info:" query then a snippet appears. I am not able to understand why google is not showing URL with "site:" query. Whether the page is indexed or not? Or it's soon going to be deindexed. Secondly, I would like to mention that this is a dynamic URL. The index file which we are using to generate this URL is not available to Google Bot. For instance, There are two different URL's. http://www.abc.com/browse/ --- It's a parent page.
Technical SEO | | SameerBhatia
http://www.abc.com/browse/?q=123 --- This is the URL, generated at run time using browse index file. Google unable to crawl index file of browse page as it is unable to run independently until some value will get passed in the parameter and is not indexed by Google. Earlier the dynamic URL's were indexed and was showing up in Google for "site:" query but now it is not showing up. Can anyone help me what is happening here? Please advise. Thanks0 -
URL structuring / redirect question
Hi there, I have a URL structuring / redirect question. I have many pages on my site but I set each page up to fall under one of two folders as I serve two unique markets and want each side to be indexed properly. I have SIDE A: www.domain/FOLDER-A.com and SIDE B: www.domain/FOLDER-B. The problem is that I have a page for www.domain.com and www.domain/FOLDER-A/page1.com but I do NOT have a page for www.domain/FOLDER-A. The reason for this is that I've opted to make what would be www.domain/FOLDER-A be www.domain.com and act the primary landing page the site. As a result, there is no page located at www.domain/FOLDER-A. My WordPress template (Divi by Elegant Themes) forced me to create a blank page to be able to build off the FOLDER-A framework. My question is that given I am forced to have this blank page, do I leave it be or create a 302 or 307 redirect to www.domain.com? I fear using a 301 redirect given I may want to utilize this page for content at some point in the future. This isn't the easiest post to follow so please let me know if I need to restate the question. Many thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | KurtWSEO0 -
URL Parameters
On our webshop we've added some URL-parameters. We've set URL's like min_price, filter_cat, filter_color etc. on "don't Crawl" in our Google Search console. We see that some parameters have 100.000+ URL's and some have 10.000+ Is it better to add these parameters in the robots.txt file? And if that's better, how can we write it down so the URL's will not be crawled. Our robotos.txt files shows now: # Added by SEO Ultimate's Link Mask Generator module User-agent: * Disallow: /go/ # End Link Mask Generator output User-agent: * Disallow: /wp-admin/
Technical SEO | | Happy-SEO1 -
Why xml generator is not detecting all my urls?
Hi Mozzers, After adding 3 new pages to example.com, when generating the xml sitemap, Iwasn't able to locate those 3 new url. This is the first time it is happening. I have checked the meta tags of these pages and they are fine. No meta robots setup! Any thoughts or idea why this is happening? how to fix this? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Wordpress Page vs. Posts
My campaigns are telling me I have some duplicate content. I know the reason but not sure how to correct it. Example site here: Bikers Blog is a "static page" referencing each actual "blog post" I write. This site is somewhat orphaned and about to be reconstituted. I have a number of other sites with a similar problem. I'm not sure how to structure the "page" so it only shows a summary of the blog post on the page not the whole post. Permalinks is set as "/%postname%/" I've posted on Wordpress.org with no answer. Since this is an SEO issue I thought maybe someone with WP experience could chime in. Thanks, Don
Technical SEO | | NicheGuy0 -
Query strings in Canoncials URLs
Video on my site all resides at www.mydomain.com/video in a player that does not assign unique URLs for each video. We may be able to rewrite the URLs to include a unique identifier found in the video's metadata (www.mydomain.com/video/?bctid=17769780). If I did this, how would it impact the canonical URL? Do the SEs accept canonicals with query strings? What if I only changed the canonical URL and did not change the video's URL? Would that be a problem?
Technical SEO | | BostonWright0 -
Can you 404 any forms of URL?
Hi seomozzers, <colgroup><col width="548"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F256%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F258%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F242%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F257%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F260%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F225%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F251%23comment-form |
| http://ex.com/user/login?destination=comment%2Freply%2F176%23comment-form | These are duplicate content and the canonical version is: http://www.ex.com/user (login and pass page of the website) Since there were multiple other duplicates which mostly have been resolved by 301s, I figured that all "LOGIN" URLs (above) should be 404d since they don't carry any authority and 301 those wouldn't be the best solution since "too many 301s" can slow down the website speed. But a member of the dev team said: "Looks like all the urls requested to '404 redirect' are actually the same page http://ex.com/user/login. The only part of the url that changes is the variables after the "?" . I don't think you can (or highly not recommended) make 404 pages display for variables in a url. " So my question is: I am not sure what he means by that? and Is it really better to not 404 these? Thanks0 -
Redirect everything from a certain url
I have a new domain (www.newdomain.com) and and an old domain (www.olddomain.com). Currently both domains are pointing (via dns nameserves) at the new site. I want to 301 everything that comes from the www.oldsite.com to www.newsite.com. I've used this htaccess code RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.newsite.com$
Technical SEO | | EclipseLegal
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newsite.com/$1 [R=301,L] Which works fine and redirects if someone visits www.olddomain.com but I want it to cover everything from the old domain such as www.olddomain.com/archives/article1/ etc. So if any subpages etc are visited from the old domain its redirected to the new domain. Could someone point me in the right direction? Thanks0