Variables in URLS?

[CFSSEO]

How much do variables in URLs hurt indexing of that page?  I'm worried that with this huge string of variables that the pages won't get indexed.

Here's what I think we should have: http://adomainname.com/New/Local/State/City/Make/Model/

Here's the current URL:http://adomainname.com/New/Local/MN/Bayport/Jeep/Liberty?curPage=1&pageResultSize=50&orderDir=DESC&orderBy=ModifiedDate&conditionId=1&makeId=7&modelId=141&stateProvinceName=Minnesota&mc=1

[blu42media]

Ahhh, you will definitely run into duplicate content issues!

You want to include a rel="canonical" to point to the domain & path without the variables.  You don't want this sort of URL to be indexed (use robots: noindex,follow); it's much better to show the clean URL in Google.

[SEODinosaur]

It should get indexed however it is very deep...

Its probably better idea to have it structured http://adomainname.com/Category/Location/Make&Model/

[Dr-Pete]

Yeah, my gut reaction (although there's no one-sized-fits-all answer for every site) is in line with @blu42 - it's not so much about the folder-depth here, it's that this structure is inevitably going to create "thin" content, possibly by the truckload. Post-Panda, the days of just spinning out state+city+product are pretty much gone. It used to work great for long-tail search. Now, you risk it not only not working, but actually damaging your entire site.

It would be much better, IMO to have some kind of state/city structure but then land on the same make/model page, regardless of geography. You can get some kind of geo-targeting that way AND landing pages for products, but don't try to cross them on every variation. The tiny amount of long-tail traffic you pick up will probably be dwarfed by the problems you'll have.

[SEODinosaur]

Hey Pete can you please point out a site that does this.

I know that its not good to add too many links to any page and we should only target two keywords on each page. What is the best way to optimize for every city within a state?

lets say we had 20 cities we want to target, is it best to build 10 pages each one targeting two keywords? what is the best practice for this?

[Dr-Pete]

I'm not finding a great example, offhand, but basically, I'm suggesting that you could have city/state URLs, like:

www.example.com/illinois/chicago

...make model URLs, like:

www.example.com/honda/crv

...and individual product URLs, like:

www.example.com/honda-crv-1234

... but that you DON'T mix the first two and end up with something like:

www.example.com/illinois/chicago/honda/crv

....because you're going to spin out a ton of thin content. There's no perfect way these days to even do a lot of state/city pages - Panda hasn't been kind to that. Ideally, you need to have some sort of unique content for each one. If you're just spinning out content to target keywords, you're likely to harm your site eventually.

[SEODinosaur]

Gotcha thx for the help