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Google Change Their Webmaster Guidelines
Vanessa Fox has just announced some changes to the Webmaster Guidelines:
As the web continues to change and evolve, our algorithms change right along with it. Recently, as a result of one of those algorithmic changes, we’ve modified our webmaster guidelines. Previously, these stated:
Don’t use “&id=” as a parameter in your URLs, as we don’t include these pages in our index.
However, we’ve recently removed that technical guideline, and now index URL’s that contain that parameter.
So you don’t need to worry about id parameters in the URL any longer, with the following caveat:
….dynamic URL’s with a large number of parameters may be problematic for search engine crawlers in general, so rewriting dynamic URLs into user-friendly versions is always a good practice
This is great news for any site owner that has experienced issues associated with Google mistaking their URL query strings for session id’s.
Hm, even this post was posted a couple of months ago, the &id= thing was solved long time ago.
When I started my primary web site I was even using empty spaces and national encoding characters (Eastern Europe encodings) in URLs (I was a newbie), but Google was able to crawl and index my site anyway.
In addition, some of my current URLs are veeeeeery long. I am going to cut them thanks to cookies usage sometimes in the future. But again, G sees no problems when accessing such pages, following links on them, etc.
Of course, short URLs are always better solution than tons of variables and values after the ? character.
Comment by Jan — September 6, 2007 @ 9:14 am
Ops, I forgot to mention… I started my site on 10/10/2005 and URLs were OK.
Comment by Jan — September 6, 2007 @ 9:14 am
Hi Jan
I’m doing some work with a very large site (500k+ pages) and one particular area causes all types of indexation problems. Purely down to quite elaborate, multi variable query strings. Query strings are still a very real issue with search engines.
Thanks for dropping by, rgds
Richard
Comment by Richard Hearne — September 6, 2007 @ 6:46 pm