Permalinks and Search Engines
With the increased use of dynamic content on websites, the more you will see some “ugly” urls such as “index.php?ugly=yes”. These are not only ugly to look at, but from a users point of view, don’t mean a thing and can be hard to retrace through the use of the address bar or shortcuts.
As you may have noticed with most blogs, they use a “fake” sub-directory system called permalinks, usually with the date and post name such as “../2007/06/28/photos-2-use-photography-opens-for-viewing/” which describes the post a lot better than “index.php?post=19″.
Not only does this style look better, but its more “Search Engine Friendly”. Being Search Engine Friendly is a big issue when the crawlers are looking at your site, it is quite possible that pages aren’t indexed because the crawler doesn’t see “index.php?post=29″ as being a different page. Permalinks are seen as different pages, and again like “?post=19″ not meaning anything to the user, it will mean less to the crawler, which in turn effects how high up your page comes in the search engines, which lets face it matters.
If you would like an honest (free) opinion of your site, contact me on ih@ianhulme.net
