Q and A: Which of these dynamic URLs are more acceptable to Google?

Dear Kalena...

For dynamic pages, can you comment on if either one of these URLs are more acceptable by Google? Or is anything beyond the ? treated the same way and it doesn't matter how many perimeters are after the "?"?

http://www.perle.com/products/default.asp?cat=C001
http://www.perle.com/products/default.asp?a=1&i=4

M Fong

Kalena's Answer:

Dear M Fong

According to their Webmaster Guidelines, Google doesn't index URLs that include session ids after the query string:

"Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index".

As far as I understand, the more parameters your URLs include, the more chance you have that Google will not index that page. But that is more to do with Googlebot trying to restrict the excessive server load created when indexing an unknown quantity of dynamic content.

To ensure your important content is always indexed, keep it within your top 2 directory levels, avoid session ids in your URLs and submit an XML sitemap to Google SiteMaps.

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