Google says

I started with looking up Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, which was updated as late as 9/8/2010 according to the page footer, and I found the following relevant statements:

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.

My conclusion: Static pages (without the ?) are more likely to be crawled by most search engine spiders. The more parameters you have in the query string, the more problems you can get. Google has not written off the value of static URLs just yet.

Allow search bots to crawl your sites without session IDs or arguments that track their path through the site. These techniques are useful for tracking individual user behavior, but the access pattern of bots is entirely different. Using these techniques may result in incomplete indexing of your site, as bots may not be able to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.

My conclusion: Dynamic URLs, like static ones, should describe what’s on the page, nothing more. ?category=15&id=98 is perfectly fine.

Reading from the official blog post from Google with the spot-on title “Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs“, I conclude that Google’s opinion is this:

Don’t rewrite, you can do more harm than good, since rewritten URLs can be harder to maintain.

Experts say

Experts? Who are these so-called experts? Well, I googled some topics and clicked the top topics basically. I figure that those who manage to stay in the top 10 on Google for searches on SEF URLs are probably pretty good at this search engine stuff.

So here are some opinions I’ve come across (on sites that all seem to be using static URLs):

Opinions lifted from seobook.com:

1. People are more likely to click on SEF URLs. Looks like an assumption, but Google actually backs this up.
2. The URLs will provide better anchor text if people use the URLs as the link anchor text.
3. A transition to a new CMS can be easier with static URLs
4. Dynamic URLs don’t work well for offline marketing.
5. Dynamic URLs can be used for web application fingerprinting.
6. Google’s recommendation on avoiding rewriting URLs is directed mostly at less savvy webmasters, hoping that they think before they risk messing up their website at an attempt at installing and configuring a SEF URL rewriting module of some sort.

Rand Fishkin also backs up that last opinion, basically saying you must remember that Google is approaching this from a crawling standpoint, not a marketing standpoint. He also goes on to point out some pros and cons of static and dynamic URLs, and while this is written way back in 2008 he brings up some good points:

Pros of Dynamic URLs

• Umm… they’re usually longer?
• Google (1 of the 4 major search engines) says they can effectively crawl and index them

Cons of Dynamic URLs

• Lower click-through rate in the search results, in emails, and on forums/blogs where they’re cut and pasted
• A greater chance of cutting off the end of the URL, resulting in a 404 or other error when copying/pasting
• Lower keyword relevance and keyword prominence
• Nearly impossible to write down manually and share on a business card or read over the phone to a person
• Challenging (if not impossible) to manually remember
• Does not typically create an accurate expectation of what the user will see prior to reaching the page
• Not usable in branding or print campaigns
• Won’t typically carry optimized anchor text when used as the link text (which happens frequently due to copying & pasting)

Pros of Static URLs (mostly the opposites of the above)

• Higher click-through rates in the SERPs, emails, web pages, etc.
• Higher keyword prominence and relevancy
• Easier to copy, paste and share on or offline
• Easy to remember and thus, usable in branding and offline media
• Creates an accurate expectation from users of what they’re about to see on the page
• Can be made to contain good anchor text to help the page rank higher when linked-to directly in URL format
• All 4 of the major search engines (and plenty of minor engines) generally handle static URLs more easily than dynamic ones, particularly if there are multiple parameters

Cons of Statics URLs

You might mess up the rewriting process, in which case your users and search engines will struggle to find content properly on your site.

This is however a field in which things change rapidly, like in everything else web-related.

I’ll conclude for now with still thinking that SEF URLs will help SEO efforts, if you care about that. If you don’t, people will probably still find your content.

I don’t think it’s the most important part of SEO though. Everything starts at producing quality content. If you don’t have the quality content, working with SEF URLs will probably be a waste of time. If you’re using Joomla or WordPress, or basically any modern web framework or CMS, you’ll probably get SEF URLs for free, included in the package. In this context I see nothing wrong with just activating the feature, as it will give you some extra benefits.

I recommend that anyone currently involved in setting up or sending e-mail newsletters stop by this site to check out what you can do to contribute. This should be highly relevant for anyone with a CMS out there…

Email Standards

[tags]email,standards,launch[/tags]

This week I got an e-mail from Rajeev Goel, co-founder and General Manager of PubMatic, asking if I would consider talking with him concerning my recent blog post about abandoning PubMatic. where I decided to stop using it because it would seem as if PubMatic was taking half of my ad income. Well… I was mistaken on that part, and Rajeev also let me in on a few of the secrets behind the inner workings of PubMatic.

Let’s get the misunderstanding out of the way first: I thought PubMatic was taking half of my ad views, and that turned out to be a really stupid mistake on my part. I had set up my ads to display PubMatic ads half of the time, and Google Adsense the other half of the time. To make a long story short: PubMatic would only count the ads it displayed through it’s own system, this being mostly Adsense blocks with colour variations, while Adsense itself would count all the ads it displayed directly AND all the ads served through PubMatic since they too were in fact Googleads. So the joke is on me, and to the PubMatic team: I am sorry you had to take a long distance call from California to Norway to explain this to myself.

Getting a phonecall from California
Yes, Rajeev actually gave me a call and went through my numbers with me, asking me what I did not like with PubMatic and trying to explain and/or find solutions to my issues. As he pointed out, I at least had a 10% increase in ad income, without lifting a finger I might add. This even without letting PubMatic roam free and give it the opportunity to optimize at it’s own accord, which I will start doing from now on to see what it might really do. He was also keen to explain a bit around how their ad selection system works and how they plan on making money on this system, but he also asked me kindly not to reveal this on my blog. I got the opportunity to fill him in on my opinion on the PubMatic system as a whole, which I must admit is pretty nifty now that the whole misunderstanding from last week has been cleared up.

Learning to love complaining clients
To sum up: Yes, he actually scheduled a call three days in advance, and took 20 minutes of his time to take a long distance conversation to one, tiny, insignificant and dissattisfied customer in Bodø, Norway. In return I naturally answered any question he had, like for instance how I came across PubMatic. All in all, I think there is alot to be learned here that many web application developers might not even consider. Sure the world is large and the number of potential online clients is probably insanely large, but attention to the little man might get you alot of well-earned credits and online attention. Brendon Sinclair wrote a small piece on learning to love complaining clients, and I think he makes a few good points there.

[tags]Marketing,Adsense,PubMatic,Google,Advertising[/tags]

I am going to try using image-only ads, and using text ads as a backup. Code in my ads.php-file is basically like this:

if (format_requested == text) {
show_google_text_ads(); // uses a flat background color as alternate, if no text ads are found
} else {
show_google_image_ads(); // uses ads.php?format=text as alternate, hence it will load textads if no imageads are found
}


So if no format is requested, the code will display images first and foremost. If no image ads can be found, text ads will be used instead. If no text ads are found either, it will just display a flat background color and no ads.

The ad position (top right banner) I am using has a really low eCPM, so there are very few dollars involved in this experiment. I suspect that users have adopted a Google Ads banner blindness and I want to try hitting them with a few flashy colored banners every now and then to see how that turns out. I’ll try to keep you posted on my progress.

So, reporting in after day one!

Signing up with Pubmatic was easy. I have decided to test this on my Norwegian Martial Arts forum at kampforum.no. To begin with, I have decided to run a 468 x 60 ad block in the top of the forum with PubMatics little javascript magic. This is an ad spot that recently has run Googleads exclusively, and at a lousy $0.38 eCPM in August 2007. So it should be easy to improve this.

At this time I still only have a Google Adsense account, so PubMatic is only rotating lots of text ads in really funky colors. I have signed up in the other programs availabe to try to give PubMatic as much of a chance to vary and find an optimal mix of ads and colors as possible. The colors of my ad used to be really low key and non-intrusive on the reader, so I am expecting complaints from the users of the forum, but none have arrived yet.

I don’t have any numbers yet from pubmatic. I recon I will report back in a week or two when I have some to show off.

[tags]advertising, pubmatic, review, testing, ads, adsense[/tags]