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| Feb 12, 2009 8:37 pm |
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re: Dorvak says SEO URLs suck. |
Kent Allen
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I think Dvorak is incredibly bright, when it comes to his area of expertise. But as is typical with smart people, they seem to think their intelligence is omnipresent. He knows nothing of the origins of the long url and why he was led down that path. Plus... his blog posts were already very, very popular (as they should have been). He should not have expected to see any noticeable improvement in traffic, as I would expect much of his traffic comes via non-search engine sources.
The whole idea of SEO friendly urls did not come from trying to game the search engines, rather it came from the fact that the search engines were absolutely horrible at spidering dynamic urls. On my first (and still most traffic'd site), I had over 4000 unique pages of content as far back as 2002. All but 10 pages used dynamic parameters to serve up the appropriate content. And in Google... only those 10 pages were indexed. Hmmm... how to solve? Remember, this is also pre-XML-sitemaps.
I put in a php 404 handler (the less efficient way to handle SEO friend urls, but one that offers some unique flexbility) and converted all of my links to SEF links. The result... within 2 weeks, I went from 10 indexed pages to over 4000. You can guess the impact... traffic shot up significantly.
It has only been in the last year or so that search engines have really spidered dynamic urls with a high level of success, and some spiders don't appear to do a good job still.
So, to respond to Dvorak's assertion, I simply say, speak about that which you have some level of knowledge.
Kent Allen
Three Stone Media, Inc: http://www.threestonemedia.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/esoomllubPrivate Reply to Kent Allen (new win) |
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