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blazin (119416)

blazin
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http://davidstockton.com/
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[Ask a subset of /.] Mod_rewrite and google indexing

[ #140713 ]
Friday July 28 2006, @01:10PM
Google

I am working on some code to rewrite some urls on our website which are currently something like:

http://www.domain.com/phones/phoneDetails.php?id=39

to

http://www.domain.com/phones/details/39/Motorola%20RAZR.html

I think that something like

http://www.domain.com/phones/details/39/Motorola_RAZR.html

is more easily human readable but I've been told that google will index the one with the %20 with keywords for both Motorola and RAZR, while the second one will be indexed with Motorola_RAZR and people searching for just RAZR will not be able to find it as easily.

I am not a big fan of spaces in URLs, and I have a hard time believing that the braniacs at google would have any trouble extracting Motorola and RAZR from the url with an underscore. Does anyone know for sure which way google prefers, or have any resources about what sorts of things google looks for in the URL that help page ranking?

Thanks in advance.


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[Ask a subset of /.] Mod_rewrite and google indexing 9 Comments More | Login /

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  • I have no real info, but it seems to me that Motorola+Razr should work the same way as Motorola%20Razr
    • Also, I don't know about URLS but in the text on the page Google seems to treat all non-alphanumeric characters as spaces.
      • I think that is probably true. The weirdness is in the differences between a search for "Motorola RAZR", "Motorola_RAZR", "Motorola+RAZR" and "Motorola%20RAZR". Of course I'm not really trying to get good page rank for the last three, but it is interesting that the results are different for those searches. I've heard that having the search term in the URL is good for pagerank... I guess I'll find out sunday evening.
    • I was thinking the same thing. Go with + ... I find that even more readable than _.
  • the info on the page as well? I thought they referenced the keywords on the whole page, not just the URL. Sure, a MotoRazr URL would probably key as well.

    How often do you get hits from google searches like that?
    • I just found this on http://www.googleguide.com/google_works.html [googleguide.com] :

      Since Google indexes HTML code in addition to the text on the page, users can restrict searches on the basis of where query words appear, e.g., in the title, in the URL, in the body, and in links to the page, options offered by the Advanced-Search page and search operators.

      I would take that to mean that it doesn't include keywords in the URL unless you use Advanced or search operators.
      • Yup google does index the contents of the page. I'd heard or been told that having the thing the page was about as part of the url, eg, the Motorola RAZR, is good for page rank. We weren't sure if it mattered if it were a space or _ or whatever. Thank you for the link. It sounds like it won't matter too much for us until people look for the phones with the inurl: search argument. I guess we'll find out what happens with it soon anyway.

        Thank you.

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