Removing '?' from address

[IlinkAdv]

Hi everyone! First post and thanks in advance.

I have a client that has a Shopsite cart and a company that they hired to do their SEO informed them that the '?' in their URLs is looked at as "unfavorable" by the Search Engines. So for instance:

http://www.shopnw.net/sc/order.cgi?rd=1 ... /satin.htm

They were wondering if the '?' just behind the 'order.cgi' in the URL could be removed or is this contrary to how Shopsite works?

Has anyone ever heard of this? Does this even make sense?

[loren_d_c]

I've never heard of this and it doesn't make sense. The '?' is a common parameter that separates the URL from the parameter strings. It is required on the ShopSite order button URLs, and it's used all over the web. I highly doubt that search engines penalize for this at all.

Beware of what you hear from some SEO's, there are a lot of 'old wives tales' out there about what search engines do and don't like and IMHO some companies like to perpetuate these types of myths to justify their fees.

-Loren

[loren_d_c]

Also, since there really is no point in a search engine spider indexing your shopping cart screen it is probably a good idea to disallow it in your robots.txt file, something like this for your particular store:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /sc/

This tells the search engine spiders (nice ones that pay attention to robots.txt files, at least) to not follow links to your shopping cart cgi directory.

-Loren

[oliver.dooley]

You have the ability to create a custom URL structure. This can improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links. For example:

This: » http://www.myurl.com/?p=123

could equal this: » http://www.myurl.com/2007/06/06/sample-post/

or this: » http://www.myurl.com/archives/123

and so on.

One way of doing this is using URL rewriting. I have posted a few links that should point you in the right direction however just do a search for 'URL rewrite" and i am sure you can find what you are looking for:

Documentation
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html
http://www.csharpfriends.com/Articles/getTip.aspx?articleID=215

Tools:
http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/url-rewriting/
http://www.elfurl.com/success
http://www.rukispot.com/cube-cart-cc3-seo-mod-search-engine-friendly-urls-custom-urls-meta-tags-robotstxt-php-session-killer/

[loren_d_c]

This is probably a good thing to do for your site if it has dynamically generated content pages perhaps to help that content get indexed better, however I don't see how this would help you with the shopping cart URLs. If anything, you don't want the shopping cart screens to be indexed at all by the search engine.

-Loren

[IlinkAdv]

Thanks for the helpful info everyone. I think Loren has the right idea in that the client would rather not have these dynamic URLs be spidered. Can you tell me more about what this means?

User-agent: *
Disallow: /sc/

[loren_d_c]

A robots.txt file is a file you put in your site's document root directory that gives direction for search engine spiders and tells them what they shouldn't do on your site. Search engine spiders are supposed to check for this file each time before they spider your site. All search engines that you would really care about pay attention to this file. For more details on robots.txt files, see the website:

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion-admin.html

-Loren