Search Engine Friendly url

[bngari]

Hi, I have a website that usually has long query strings and I want to change that to the more convenient and Search Engine Friendly urls. Any pointers will be appreciated. The website is http://sinema.co.ke

Cheers, Biko.

[MattF]

There's no such thing as a search engine friendly URI. It's a myth which the SEO "experts", (Google did also help to propogate it at one time too, which doesn't help), have been using to milk their income from for years. The only difference between standard and fancified URI's are that one is more easily understandable by people, (not bots). Don't waste your time unless you have a personal reason for wanting to implement them. Search engines won't give a toss what the URI looks like. The only valid'ish reason for using them is if you want people to see something like: "article-name-here" rather than "article?id=256".

[bngari]

I thought so too but its always good to have a second opinion. But i have another project where the client wants these search engine friendly URI so i just have to know how to!

[djm0219]

Do your client a favor and explain that they aren't really needed and that they'll save money if you are able to focus on other things for their site instead of that area.

[MattF]

Originally Posted by djm0219

Do your client a favor and explain that they aren't really needed and that they'll save money if you are able to focus on other things for their site instead of that area.

That would definitely be the best option. A link from Google's blog on the subject:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...atic-urls.html

If you do end up going down this rewriting route though, there are a few possible options. Are you creating this system from scratch or using an existing CMS or similar? If the latter, a rewrite option/mod/plugin may already exist for it.

If from scratch, you can either use rewrite rules to rewrite your fancy URI's to the dynamic equivalent, or, you can parse the request URI directly within your scripts and build the query from there, by using a custom 404 handler script. Any page which isn't recognised as existing gets passed to your handler where you do the internal rewriting/processing.

[googliciousgr]

Yes but now we have 2012 and in terms of SEO friendly URLS they do exists guys.
For example, a URL with more than 160 Characters is NOT seo friendly but Google bot will still crawl it but that does not means that it has a maximum value since Google changed the way they show URLS in search engines.
So, it would be better to just have small URls for User Experience too.

Hope that helps.