Jochem Maas wrote:
Ashley Sheridan schreef:
On Wed, 2008-10-15 at 00:58 +0100, Nathan Rixham wrote:
Ashley Sheridan wrote:
On Wed, 2008-10-15 at 01:17 +0200, Jochem Maas wrote:
Nathan Rixham schreef:
Ashley Sheridan wrote:
On Tue, 2008-10-14 at 14:54 -0700, Ryan S wrote:
quite a few sites seem to have a very neat way of implementing this
with (url rewriting?) something like
http://sitename/blog/tags/tag-comes-here/
As for getting those search terms, well a link in a page can contain GET
values, such as http://www.somedomain.com/blog?tag=search_term .
Alternatively, you could use mod-rewrite to rewrite the URL and turn the
path into tag variables. This is the same as the above but with the
added benefit that users can type in tags directly more easily, and
there are apparently benefits for SEO with this method as well (but I'm
not sure how true that is)
it's very true; from the google webmaster 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.
previously it was text along the lines of "google doesn't index all
pages with query parameters, so avoid them where possible"
additionally one of the weightier points in categorising pages within
the SERPS is the text in the url (especially if the page is actually
about /the_tag_in_the_url : see http://www.google.com/search?q=tags)
^-- some what ironic :-)
Yeah I saw that too...
What always gets me is that forums always feature really high on search
results, and I've yet to see one of these forums use URL rewriting! I
really think this belief about query-less URLs being more search engine
friendly is outdated.
Ash
www.ashleysheridan.co.uk
a search engines main job is to send people to what they are looking
for, not what an seo has determined they should be seeing, as such
"content is king".
Forums, lists and newsgroups tend to hold more specific content on
exactly what the user is searching for, hence why google shows it high
(as it's one of the few documents on the net which relate most directly
to what was searched for [long tail search terms]); additionally all the
aforementioned often have a trail of replies; sometimes this is a bonus
as the replies repeat the keyword terms; however sometimes it's to the
detriment, particularly when they wander off topic.
It's also worth noting that sites which update frequently, especially
those who update sitemaps and send out pings get crawled more frequently
and thus indexed faster. On hot-topics this has a knock on effect, the
posts get crawled by scrapers and content harvesters and re-published
(often with a link back) - and this helps as the vote count for the
original forum post goes up due to the link backs + the original source
is detected as such and given prominence over the copies (most of the time).
Further people take care to title their posts/messages correctly in
order to attract answers quickly, this text is then repeated on the
forum page in all the prominent places (title, permalink, heading
tags..) and further still, the post/message is normally perfectly
matched to the user specified title - so it's natural seo at it's best.
(Worth having a read up on contextual and semantic analysis as well)
Next up, the sites weight, as forums often have thousands (or hundreds
of thousands) of pages/posts, and high volume traffic, the site is
deemed more important and thus higher ranking, which brings in more
traffic and so it spirals. On this note it's also worth considering that
google track what you click on so if searchers continually click item 3
in the search results, over time they'll move it up as it's been classed
as most accurate for that search (more.. obviously due to wide use of
analytics and checking when a user comes back to the results to click
another they can also harvest accuracy data by comparing bounce rates
etc and adjust accordingly).
so much more on this subject but that's about the top and bottom of it
in this scenario.
*yawn* getting late
You're preaching to the converted on this topic, I've already put
together a couple of articles on my site about it in the past. What I
was saying was that the sites that seem to feature so prominently on
listings were in fact using querystring URLs; the very thing that SEO
guides tell us not to use. I think it's just an outdated belief that URL
rewriting is better, as clearly it doesn't ever seem to be.
obviously the converted weren't listening.
indeed, the point being (perhaps I didn't make it clear) is that the
forum posts you are talking about are listed highly due to several other
major factors, the difference between using dynamic (querystring) and
static urls only comes in to play when all other factors are pretty much
equal; in this scenario the static urls with keywords in will *always*
out rank the dynamic urls. (fact: a keyword in a static url is +1 to the
weight of the page, without it you can't get that +1).
Additionally (feel free to test this) a site with 3000 unique pages all
using static urls will invariably get fully indexed - whereas the same
site with 3000 dynamic urls generally will not.
--
nathan ( nathan@xxxxxxxxxxx )
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