A Proust of the Web would have no need for URL re-writing. If you are part of the .1% of the Web building population that has the time to sit down every day and create a brand new page of unique content from scratch, then read no further. Simply keep your FrontPage or Dreamweaver icon close at hand on your desktop, and go with our blessing.

If, on the other hand, you are part of the much larger percentage of serious web users who deal with database driven websites (regardless of whether the site is product or content centered) then some thought about your website’s URLs is certainly in order.

Why?

Glad you asked. For starters, of all of the “static elements” of a page (i.e. the elements that exist independently of external content. These include the title, header, word density ratio, etc.) the one weighed most highly by the search engines is the actual URL.

Try searching for whatever in Google. No, really. Go to Google.com and type “whatever” in the search box. At the time of writing, the first result that appears is the following URL: www.scalzi.com/whatever/ The second result is, of course, whatever.com.

Now one should not confuse this point by thinking that having all the right key terms somewhere in your URL will guarantee you high rankings for that term. It is completely possible to rank in the first 10 results without having a single term appear in the URL of your page. It is only one factor in a very complex equation; however, it is an important one and should not be ignored by those wishing to break into a highly competitive arena.

It should be noted, however, (as in the previous example) that Google and other SE’s “count” terms that appear anywhere in the URL. Getting clean URLs, then, goes far beyond simply choosing the right domain name (i.e. the words that come before .com, .net, .org, etc.) In fact, what comes after the slash can be equally if not more important that what comes before.

???

Good point. It should be noted that if you are using any kind of programming on your website, (quickly identifiable by the use of ‘?’ or ‘&’ marks in your URL) you will need to immediately consider URL rewriting if you wish to make your page addresses search engine–not to mention user–friendly.

You can usually tell if your site using programming (also called a “dynamic” site) based upon the URLs of most of the pages. They might look something like this:

http://www.mywebsite.com/badurl.asp?product=123&category=456

If you’re lucky, some basic re-writing might be in place, so your URL would look more like this:

http://www.mywebsite.com/PPF/product/123/category/456/badurl.asp

While this second example may look a little nicer, both suffer from major limitations set in place by search engines that want to level the playing field between human verses computer generated web content.

Namely, there are two rules of thumb that show why the following two examples are bad URLs from the search engine perspective.

1. Most search engines tend to ignore anything in a URL that follows special characters such as a question mark or an ampersand. Google DOES keep a secondary index, which it calls the “supplemental results” where such pages may be placed. However, these pages will only appear after the natural (the good ‘ol website.com/home.html) pages have been exhausted. If you have these special characters in your URL, however, you really shouldn’t count on them appearing in the index in any capacity.

2. Although not as strict as the rule on special characters, most search engines do stop after a certain number of slash marks. The general rule is that you should not go more than five “levels” deep on any URL. (The example given shows a popular technique in which parameters are passed as virtual “directories.”) It seems that more weight is given to pages that appear on the “root” directory (after the first slash following your domain name) of a given website.

How can I clean my URLs?

There are several different basic techniques to rewriting the URLs of a website, but all of them must be customized to the structure of an individual website depending upon its specific needs. However, there are URL rewriting options available for any server operating system and can be applied whether your website is written in ASP, PHP, perl or other.

Click here to contact informationarchitech.com. We would be happy to have a look at your website and help you determine how URL rewriting and other techniques can be immediately implemented to improve your rankings in the search engines, as well as user friendliness.