Static vs Dynamic URL structure?

Question

I am the developer for a big content website which currently uses Joomla as its CMS. It currently uses static URLs (e.g. /products/apparel/shirts/calvin-klein-sh... How would changing the URL structure to a dynamic structure (e.g. /index.php?p=12345&v=ck) effect search results? Any numbers to back this up?

Answer 1

Your not going to have as much luck with SEO using those long ugly URLs.

I'm not all that familiar with Joomla, but depending on how much you are able to dig into the code, you might find the following to be a useful solution

Use the dynamic structure with a Mod Rewrite, and you'll have clean looking URLs with a dynamic structure.

As an example, open your .htaccess file and do something similar to the following:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^products/apparel/shirts/(.*)$ manufacturer.php?id=$1 [L]

Then create manufacturer.php which would follow your basic product page template (I'm assuming you have some sort of product page template).

At the beginning of that use some code similar to the following:

$id = $_GET['id'];

$id = str_replace("/", "", $id);

Or for better security, and to keep out space characters and other strange characters that don't appear well in a URL, you could use:

$id = preg_replace('#[^A-Za-z0-9_-]#','',$id);

But you will need to match $id with your database id.

From there on you can suddenly have thousands of pages that are built around the id so that they contain unique content, and unique URLs.

Be sure to use $id in the title and description tags.  Duplicate meta tags wouldn't get you very far with Google.

Answer 2

Static URL's are Search Engine friendly

dynamic urls' because of symbols used to serve pages, can cause search engines to ignore them or return bad search results.

here are some artciles on why dynamic urls are not good to use:

http://www.websitepublisher.net/article/...

http://www.searchtools.com/robots/goodur...

You can always create search friend urls, through a mod-rewrite.