Rewritten URLs
In this episode of the ‘How to SEO’ manual, Position Gold Ltd will be looking at rewritten URLs, explaining what they are, how they work and the advantages and disadvantages that they can offer a website in terms of search engine optimisation.
A webpage within a website, has a URL:
Example 1:
www.website.com/webpage?thisis=1query=2
The highlighted last part of the URL is the query string. This is essentially the web pages’ identity, this is how it appears within the .htaccess database. The query string is essentially a coded identity that the database uses to rapidly index and search for within the websites database.
Example 2:
www.website.com/webpage/page-one
The above URL is exactly the same as the URL in example 1, except it has been rewritten by a module. There are many reasons for rewriting a URL, the majority of them are advantageous for a website, although they can be disadvantageous when done incorrectly.
Advantages of rewritten URLs
A rewritten URL is much more easy to read and understand for all human users. A computer user will follow the rewritten URL back to its coding in order to understand it. Humans obviously cannot do this, so by rewriting the URL it becomes easier to work with; in both reading it, typing it and remembering it. From an SEO perspective, the rewritten URL allows you to put keywords within the URL which will helps your website to rank well within the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). For example, if you have a shoe shop, a keyword that is relevant to your website is shoes. It is much better to have your main keyword in your URL, rather than coding. For example:
www.onyourfeet.com/market?marketpage=2scroll=3
This would not rank very within the SERPs, however, with the mod rewrite it would appear like this:
www.onyourfeet.com/shoeshop
This is much better for the website as it contains the keyword within the URL which means its ranking would benefit greatly within the SERPs.
Disadvantages of rewritten URLs
There aren’t any massive disadvantages of having a rewritten URL, however, problems do arise if the database and the coding is done incorrectly, if this is the case it can cause serious damage to your website. If it is not done properly than it can hinder the Search Engine spiders from spidering your website, this can cause problems as it means that you may not be indexed and ranked as efficiently as you should be within the SERPs. Another Problem when it is done badly is that it can cause your website to have duplicate content issues, which the search engines frown upon (as they see it as spamming). If a search engine deems you to have duplicate content, and therefore sees you as spamming which can result in your website being punished within the SERPs or even banned form them.
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