Based on the previous
section, you might have gotten the impression that the algorithms of
search engines try to humiliate every designer effort to make a site
gorgeous. Well, it has been explained why search engines do not like
image, movies, applets and other extras. Now, you might think that
search engines are far too cheeky to dislike dynamic URLs either.
Honestly, users are also not in love with URLs like
http://domain.com/product.php?cid=1&pid=5 because such URLs do not
tell much about the contents of the page.
There are a couple of
good reasons why static URLs score better than dynamic URLs. First,
dynamic URLs are not always there – i.e. the page is generated on
request after the user performs some kind of action (fills a form and
submits it or performs a search using the site's search engine). In a
sense, such pages are nonexistent for search engines, because they index
the Web by crawling it, not by filling in forms.
Second, even if
a dynamic page has already been generated by a previous user request
and is stored on the server, search engines might just skip it if it has
too many question marks and other special symbols in it. Once upon a
time search engines did not index dynamic pages at all, while today they
do index them but generally slower than they index static pages.
The
idea is not to revert to static HTML only. Database-driven sites are
great but it will be much better if you serve your pages to the search
engines and users in a format they can easily handle. One of the
solutions of the dynamic URLs problem is called URL rewriting. There are
special tools (different for different platforms and servers) that
rewrite URLs in a friendlier format, so they appear in the browser like
normal HTML pages. Try the URL Rewriting Tool below, it will convert the
cryptic text from the previous example into something more readable,
like http://mydomain.com/product-categoryid-1-productid-5.