Dynamic page

[ciznerguy]

I have few pages on my site that are with this nature

/locator/find?radius=60&zip=&state=FL

I read at Google webmaster that they suggest not to change URL's like this

"According to Google's Blog (link below) they are able to crawl the simplified dynamic URL just fine, and it is even encouraged to use a simple dynamic URL ( " It's much safer to serve us the original dynamic URL and let us handle the problem of detecting and avoiding problematic parameters. " )

_http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/09/dynamic-urls-vs-static-urls.html _It can also actually lead to a decrease as per this line: " We might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URLs if you try to make your urls look static and in the process hide parameters which offer the Googlebot valuable information.  "The URLs are already simplified without any extra parameters, which is the recommended structure from Google:"Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That's our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems"

I would love to get some opinions on this also please consider that those pages are not cached by Google for some reason.

[ciznerguy]

correction the pages are found by Google

[videriconcept]

Hi,

I think that this does not mean, that you have to avoid rewriting dynamic urls at all but take care of the accessibility of your information.

for your url it could be interesting to build your domain like:

/locator/florida/find?radius=60
/locator/24786/find?radius=60

or even better:

/stores-near-florida/find?range=60 /stores-near-24786/find?range=60

the suggestion of google just sais, that you have to avoid that information is being lost by mapping your dynamic url to a static. you should leave the radius parameter in the url because google could vary this parameter.

[CleverPhD]

I think this is an answer that goes beyond Google.  We use rewrites extensively and do not have any problems.  There are some caveats

1. Regarding GoogleBot missing information, you just need to make sure that the new URL has all the info.

Lets say you are a plumbing portal and use

/locator/find?radius=60&zip=&state=FL

rewrite to

/plumbers/florida-fl/miami/33110/

Your search radius can be a default value vs having to put it in as a parameter.

It helps with site structure to think of things as how they would be as a static directory.  In this case, you are actually giving more information to GoogleBot with the rewritten URL vs the old one as you have included who you are searching for (a plumber) the city (miami), state (fl) and zip code (33110).  The previous URL only indicated the state.  If you dont like using all the folders, you can simply have a longer file name with dashes in between the words.

2. If you use rewrites, make sure Google is not spidering the original URLs otherwise you get penalized for duplicate errors.  Monitoring Webmaster Tools or using spider software will help you find the holes.  You can then use things like Canonical Links and Noindex Tags to get the old URLs out of the index and make sure Google has the correct pages.    This all depends on how you implement your rewrites.

3. If you take some time to look at how you want to organized your site to start with then the first two items will take care of themselves usually.  A good exercise is to write down how all of this would work within a breadcrumb navigation.  This forces you to get organized and also helps you setup how you want all your pages to be shown to Google.   If you do start to add parameters on top of this basic structure like pagination or other sortable options, you need to think how you would noindex, follow those pages to make sure that your main page would rank for a given key phrase vs all the other sorted versions of the same page.

4. One thing that is overlooked in setting up this kind of structure is that you can use it to your advantage in your analytic tools to look at global trends to your site.  This could be in any site.  Using the example above, all US states are at the 2nd level directory, cities are 3rd and zip is 4th.  Makes it really super easy to use a regexp on urls to group them.  For example, you could setup a filter in you analytics to easily combine all sessions that looked at pages in Florida and wanted to see what the next action was.

Cheers!