what is the best format for urls when it comes to seo

[Nick Way]

Hi guys

I’m building a site from the ground up, and today I am looking at the link structure.

Which is the best out of these would you say? – or is there a better option?

Option 1:
www.abc.com/somepage.cfm?productid=1234
- this is how our urls will look natively, not ideal.

Option 2:
www.abc.com/car-parts/fuel-systems/1234

- this looks nice but actually points to a *virtual* page that is several sub directories deep; im sure i read somewhere that the closer a page is the root the better google will rate it... so maybe this is better..

Option 3:
www.abc.com/car-parts-fuel-systems/1234
- less visually attractive to my way of thinking but perhaps google would rate this page higher than the option 2?

Option 4:
www.abc.com/car-parts-fuel-systems-1234
- my favourite I think – but I am no SEO expert

Option 5
www.abc.com/products.cfm/car-parts/fuel-systems/1234

How about this (which had been suggested to me but i don’t like). I don’t like it because it isn’t www3 correct is it?

Any comments would be gratefully received, than you very much indeed.

Is there a better way than the options I’ve put up here?

Thanks in advance.

Nick

[Newsgroup_User]

happysailingdude wrote:
> Hi guys
>
> I'm building a site from the ground up, and today I am looking at the link
> structure.

My personal favorite SEO technique is this one.

www.abc.com/a-cool-product.cfm
www.abc.com/b-even-cooler-product.cfm

Each of these cfm templates contain something like the following two lines:

<cfset productid=1234>
<cfinclude template="productDetail.cfm">

Now a search engine has no idea at all these detail pages are not all
unique pages. Also, your product name is in the URL which is a prime
location for search engines to see it.

With ColdFusion <cffile...> tags it is very easy to create a publishing
process that automatically creates these two line facade pages. With
even more advance techniques that trap 404 errors before returning them
to the client, you can do this on the fly.

If you really want to hide the dynamic nature of these pages. Configure
your ColdFusion server to process .htm|.html files and then you can name
these files like this:

www.abc.com/a-cool-product.htm
www.abc.com/b-even-cooler-product.htm

Which I have read search engines give a higher credibility to do to the
perceived hand coded nature.

[Oğuz_Demirkapı]

I do not see any differences for options 2,3,4,5.

We have also something like following in same projects and works as expected.

www.abc.com/index.cfm/car-parts/fuel-systems/1234

[Dinghus]

The answer is, who knows? Google changes so often nowdays that what works 1 day won't work the next. So set it up for YOU and make it easy to navigate and the people will hopefully come.
And yes, the closer to root, the better the rank. That hasn't changed.