Free Link Friday!
by Mike Pantoliano. Posted on September 26th, 2008 in Free Link Friday, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization
Introducing a brand new feature to the Groove eCommerce Blog: Free Link Friday! Free Link Friday is named after one of the best employee perks of Groove Commerce, Free Lunch Friday. FLF will be a weekly installment of some of the most important and thought provoking links from around the web in the field of SEO/SEM (and maybe a few wildcards!) Read on for the inaugural edition.
Most importantly this week is a blog post from the Google Webmaster blog. When Google speaks, everyone listens. This post describes a huge change in SEO philosophy for Google. Before October 2006, Google could not even spider dynamic URL’s. When they announced that they could back in 2006, they still recommended rewriting URLs. Now, Google states they prefer that webmasters not rewrite URLs…
Thus, the ensuing commentary:
- Search Engine Land provides a great recap.
- Rand Fishkin of SeoMOZ breaks down the pros and cons.
- Smackdown lays the smackdown on Google. He’s not a fan.
- George Murphy, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the Baltimore SEO Meetup earlier this week, weighs in with his opinion on rewriting vs dynamic URLs.
Speaking of the Baltimore SEO Meetup, Jon Payne has a recap of the event, and some discussion about future events. If you’re from the Baltmore area, be sure to check it out!
4 Comments
Murph Says:
Looks like it’s unanimous. Hey Google… you aint gots ta liiiieeeee craaiiiiggg.
Thanks for the link man, some great reads.
Chris Monty Says:
Mmmmmmm…….free links. Aaaaaarghhhh.
Great idea and great post.
Jon Payne Says:
Thanks for the shout Mike.
But where are all these free links? And can we take a few to go?
One note – you mentioned Google couldn’t spider dynamic URLs before 2006. I think you were just writing shorthand there, but they totally could. They’ve been able to index dynamic URLs pretty much forever. The problems came in if you have many parameters in the URL – like 4 or 5 or more… and also if you had session IDs. It wasn’t really a technical issue on there end, but just that when you have 5 parameters and/or session IDs it makes it almost impossible from a site management standpoint to be 100% consistent with your URL structure, so Google would end up indexing essentially the same page under 10 different URLs and you’d have lots of duplicate content issues and whatnot.
Anyhow, to me their blog post basically said “We’d prefer you to not re-write your URLs b/c 1) we want to know they are dynamic b/c it helps us do our job, and 2) its hard and you might mess it up so don’t try.
Neither of those seem very convincing to me.
Amrendra Says:
Any way you suggestion is somewhat nice and tells to get something even there.