Sort parameters and overly dynamic URLs

[jamesm5i]

Howdy mozzers

I have a car dealership site with an inventory page that allows users to specify dealer location, model, make, year, etc. with drop-down menus. Each new choice changes the URL parameters and unspecified categories appear as "...&model=&year=..."

I've attended to the URL parameters in Webmaster Tools, and according to Google's new URL parameters video, it looks like they've got a handle on navigating the site. That said, I do get warnings in my seomoz crawls that these URLs are overly dynamic (there are up to 12 parameters per URL).

How concerned should I be? How would the Moz community suggest handling this many parameters in my URLs?

Thanks as always

[ChristopherM]

Hey James,

I have to tell you, I have a number of websites that I look after that have incredibly long parameter URLs and/or horribly unfriendly URLs, but none of the sites rank badly because the rest of the SEO is done well and completely white hat. So, off the bat, I say you shouldn't worry too much.

If you have a URL such as www.carfind.com?make=honda&price=20000&color=red&year=2005... but obviously on your site, is Google indexing these URLs? Surely they're just dynamic searches essentially? Each car on the website has an actual absolute URL? It's the absolute URLs that I would worry about, and I'd rather put my time and effort into that than changing search queried URLs.

Just my opinion based on sites I've worked on

Cheers.

[jamesm5i]

Much appreciated, Christopher.

[ChristopherM]

Hit the Good Answer button! lol.

My pleasure James, let's see if anyone else comes and adds some value, but I feel that what I've said is quite accurate and it's how I would have done it.