Query String Removal Helpful?
Those of you in Search Engine Optimization circles have no doubt read the article about a recent Search Engine Watch Case Study ... or perhaps you read the article about the case study ... or the Digg comments about the article about the case study.
The case study, titled "Remapping Dynamic URLs to Static URLs can Increase Traffic", describes what happened when PlumberSurplus.com rewrote all the links on their site, in particular the sitewide removal of the query string (the part after the question mark).
For instance, this Bathroom Faucets link (and others like it):
Was rewritten and permanently redirected to:
What happened next? "Within two months, rankings began to improve, and the number of indexed pages began to increase." Who-hoo!
I'm somewhat hesitant, however, to jump to conclusions about the query string removal (the "remapping of dynamic to static URLs") being the cause celebre here. Consider:
Note that Plumber Surplus did undertake other SEO activities during this timeframe, so it's hard to credit all the search engine ranking and indexing improvements to this change alone.
In fact, one of those changes is staring us right in the face ... and I say it was this other change, not the query string removal, that had the greater effect.
Back to the beginning. PlumberSurplus.com had a lot of links that looked pretty much the same, except for that numeric category ID.
There's just not a whole lot about a lone integer (991 or otherwise) that screams context, Mersenne Primes and other special numbers notwithstanding (but I digress). I suspect a search engine is just as likely to ignore "991" as it is other stopwords like "and" or "the" - it's noise, not signal.
So what does that leave in the case of Plumber Surplus? A bunch of links that look very identical indeed:
http://www.plumbersurplus.com/category.aspx
No wonder they weren't getting much search engine love! Now let's look at that new spelling again:
The 991 is still there (and is still noise, IMO). What else is helping things along then? Of course, the category name "Bathroom-Faucets" - content is king! Also note the use of hyphens (and not underscores) to separate the words. Another good move.
Here we have just witnessed the effects of a perfectly healthy (and all too often skipped/ignored) SEO activity: Information architecture at the link level. It's also a wonderful use of link rewriting en masse, since they didn't have to change much behind the scenes.
Moreover, they used a 301 (permanent) redirect, plus the original links didn't break along the way. A very wise move. Remember, Cool URIs Don't Change!
Another takeaway: Reworking link IA does not mean you must remove the query string. They're two separate activities even though they may be performed in tandem.
If I had my druthers I'd whittle their link down further and choose between the descriptive term or the ID. That is, keeping with their existing terminology, I could pick "cat/bathroom-faucets" or "cat/991" (since "Bathroom Faucets" and "991" are two ways of referring to the same piece of information). Given the choice, of course I'd pick the former, more descriptive spelling!
So why the redundancy? So why the redundancy? Answer: It's the simplest thing that could possibly work. No doubt it made their link remapping a breeze. They balanced bang for the buck and came out ahead.
In fact, the "Bathroom-Faucets" part doesn't even appear to be used. If I substitute any made-up category name, keeping 991 (and that's key - heh heh):
http://www.plumbersurplus.com/Cat/MadeUpCategory/991
Ultimately, you still get redirected to:
http://www.plumbersurplus.com/Cat/Bathroom-Faucets/991
So who's to say these other spellings wouldn't have worked just as well?
site.com/Cat/Bathroom-Faucets?id=991
site.com/category.aspx?name=Bathroom-Faucets&id=991
(I'm not endorsing these options incidentally, I'm just sayin'.)
For another well-worn POV on link spelling, read Cool URIs Don't Change (search for "What To Leave Out").
In closing, it occurs to me that my own links don't have much in the way of textual description. Instead, they have a sense of chronological order. Does that hurt my rankings? Good question. I suppose I should be hopeful that search engines index patterns like /2007/01/17/15.49.44/ as well.
At the very least it provides more context than, say, 991.
