Sorry your browser is not supported!

You are using an outdated browser that does not support modern web technologies, in order to use this site please update to a new browser.

Browsers supported include Chrome, FireFox, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer 10+ or Microsoft Edge.

Geek Culture / Don't use "&id="

Author
Message
Jess T
Retired Moderator
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 20th Sep 2003
Location: Over There... Kablam!
Posted: 15th Jul 2006 16:12
Link
A technical guideline from Google's Webmaster Help Center:

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


That's quite an odd tid-bit of information there, that I've never thought about before!

I actually use the 'id' paramater quite a bit in dynamic sites I create... Now I'm scared of it

Nintendo DS & Dominos :: DS Dominos
http://jt0.org
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
David T
Retired Moderator
22
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 27th Aug 2002
Location: England
Posted: 15th Jul 2006 16:27
Link
Scary. As do I. Is it just "id" or does any parameter with 'id' in the name flag up?

Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
the_winch
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 1st Feb 2003
Location: Oxford, UK
Posted: 15th Jul 2006 16:31 Edited at: 15th Jul 2006 17:02
Link
They have indexed pages in my forum that use posts.php?id=X
Example from their cache.

If you care about search engine rank it's not really a good idea. A url with the search terms in will rank higher.

By way of demonstration, he emitted a batlike squeak that was indeed bothersome.
Back to top
Profile PM Website
adr
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 21st May 2003
Location: Job Centre
Posted: 15th Jul 2006 18:03
Link
Just to provide an example, this
Quote: "http://www.onlineretailer.com/?3ru9fwe&32jowef=23rwef&wef"

Won't (or shouldn't) rank as highly as
Quote: "http://www.onlineretailer.com/clothes/male/shirts"

There's a million and one other tricks, like making sure your page title contains the keywords, which help with page ranking.

[center]
But you see, I have the will of the warrior. Therefore, the battle is already over. The winner? Me!
Back to top
Profile PM Website
Jess T
Retired Moderator
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 20th Sep 2003
Location: Over There... Kablam!
Posted: 15th Jul 2006 18:27
Link
David,
I'd say it'd only be the 'id', not something like 'productid', as that would take too many usable words out.

They must have some past troubles with sites and 'id' paramaters... Or maybe they've just got a vendeta against it

winch,
Yeah, but that is the first paramater - I thought of that straight away too, and quickly saw that sites with id as the first is ok - Odd, I know.

adr,
Yeah, I know... I actually stumbled upon it whilst looking for information about using htaccess rules, and the other related tricks
Infact, thinking about it, it was you who first mentioned it to me for the dbHelp site...

Nintendo DS & Dominos :: DS Dominos
http://jt0.org
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
the_winch
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 1st Feb 2003
Location: Oxford, UK
Posted: 15th Jul 2006 19:01 Edited at: 15th Jul 2006 19:04
Link
Quote: "They must have some past troubles with sites and 'id' paramaters... Or maybe they've just got a vendeta against it"


With dynamic sites it's difficult for a bot to work out if a link is to a different content.

To run with adr's example say you had a product page of male shirts you where selling.
http://example.com/products.php?dept=1&pr[/b]od=1
Where dept 1 is male and prod 1 is shirts.

You could also be selling trowsers
http://example.com/products.php?dept=1&pr[b]od=2
Where prod 2 is trowsers.

You could decide to order the items by popularity by default and optionally by price.
So to list male shirts by price
http://example.com/products.php?dept=1&pr[b][/b]od=1&order=price

This is a problem because they don't want to index the content more than once. It's very difficult for a bot to work out which paramaters result in different content and which produce duplicate content in a different order.

By way of demonstration, he emitted a batlike squeak that was indeed bothersome.
Back to top
Profile PM Website
Jess T
Retired Moderator
21
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 20th Sep 2003
Location: Over There... Kablam!
Posted: 15th Jul 2006 20:51
Link
Ahh, very clever little cookie (intended), aren't you?

Nintendo DS & Dominos :: DS Dominos
http://jt0.org
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Richard Davey
Retired Moderator
22
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 30th Apr 2002
Location: On the Jupiter Probe
Posted: 15th Jul 2006 21:40
Link
Quote: ""Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index.""


Google talk out of their own arse sometimes! They've indexed all of my personal sites, which all use &id= !!!

For example:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&rls=GGGL%2CGGGL%3A2006-17%2CGGGL%3Aen&q=atari+st+%2B1943+music&btnG=Search

(the top listing)

Bite my shiny metal ass
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Nicholas Thompson
20
Years of Service
User Offline
Joined: 6th Sep 2004
Location: Bognor Regis, UK
Posted: 16th Jul 2006 22:26
Link
@Rich - but if you used clean URL's you'd rank MUCH higher.

As Winch said, you could use different id tags for different pages - but also for the same page.

For example:
site.com/index.php?productid=1
site.com/index.php?productid=1&sort=asc
site.com/index.php?productid=1&page=1
site.com/index.php?productid=1&page=1&sort=asc

All of those would link to the same page and I'm not even including the combinations of those pages. Now if google saw all those as 4 unique pages based on URL and then looked at the identical content - you'd have duplicate pages. This pisses google off no end and can very easily land your site up in a sandbox where you dont appear on their listings for a long time. Happens very quickly, very often and is very difficult to get out of.

[center]
Back to top
Profile PM Email Website
Back to top

Login to post a reply

Server time is: 2024-11-17 08:23:00
Your offset time is: 2024-11-17 08:23:00