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.

Just insert one of the following blocks in your .htaccess file in your site root. Make sure you replace example.com with your own domain name, and also make sure that you leave the backslash in example\.com in the first line of the code.


# force www IN URL
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
# END force www IN URL



# force removal of www IN URL
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
# END force removal of www IN URL# force www IN URL


And here is a snippet that can forward users from one domain to another automatically. Nice to have if your site has got one or more aliases. Notice that all the domain aliases have [NC,OR] at the end of the line, while the last alias and_so_on.com just has [NC].


# forward from domain aliases
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?domain1\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?domain2\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?domain3\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?and_so_on\.com [NC]
RewriteRule (.*) http://maindomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
# END forward from domain aliases


One last thing: RewriteEngine On is just something you need to write once in your htaccess file, so if you use two of the above snippets, make sure you remove that from the second block.

[tags]htaccess,mod_rewrite,www,domainnames[/tags]

Have you tried it?

[tags]Links, link building, seo, search engine marketing, link exchange[/tags]

It’s right here: Joomla 1.6 database schema.

Continue to read about the 1.5 schema

Joomla 1.5 beta is just around the corner now. Jinx has earlier stated that it would be released before may but we are yet to see if the core devs manage to keep their promise. As part of my involvement in the standards & guidelines group in Joomla, I set up a Joomla database schema to give 3rd party developers a clearer understanding as to how the core database is structured. Click the thumbnail to the right to see the full sized schema.

Download Joomla 1.5 database diagram (From April 2006. XML-format, for use with FabFORCE DBDesigner4)

The diagram also has column info expanded, so that you can see the column types (varchar, integer, etc). This makes the schema a bit messy, but this is a feature you easily can turn on/off in DBDesigner to make it more readable again.

[tags]database,fabforce,dbdesigner,mysql,joomla,schema[/tags]