Site URLs and Server Technology

People who build and run websites have a wide array of technology to choose from. Some popular programming platforms include :

  • Hypertext Preprocesor (PHP)7
  • Active Service Pages (ASP)8
  • JavaServer Pages (JSP)9

Each of these platforms has its own language, but they all serve pages out in HTML format. From a search engine optimization perspective there is no advantage in choosing one over the other. You can choose among the platforms based on cost of operations : hiring developers, website designers, programmers, and webmasters.

If you are building a new website or undergoing a redesign and restructuring you should follow the W3C recommendations and build a website without revealing the server side scripting language. This means instead of :

Your pages' URLs should look like :

Using this scripting language will allow you to move from one technology to another without altering your site's URLs or its underlying structure.

Canonicalization

  • It's possible to serve your website under both: http://www.websitedesigners.com and http://kashmirtravels.com. However, many search engines will see both and consider it duplicate content (the same content under two URLs), and may penalize your site accordingly. To avoid this :
    • Pick either http:// or http://www and use it consistently.
    • Configure your web server to 301 redirect all traffic from the style you are not using to the style you are using.
      • (for more information on this issue see Matt Cutts' URL canonicalization advice.)

  • Static URLs and Dynamic URL Parameters, In many cases programming implementations use parameters instead of static URLs. A URL with a parameter will look like this:
    • example.com/page/?id=widget
    • While a static URL will look like this: example.com/page/widget/
    • In most cases search engines have the ability to index and rank both formats.

  • However, best practices advise the use of static URLs over dynamic ones, for reasons like :
    • You produce cleaner, easier to understand output.
    • You extract the keyword value the parameter can add.
    • As you start to add more than one parameter to a URL search engines have a harder time properly indexing the URL.
    • URLs which are not in the index will never rank or drive traffic from search engines.


For free quotes on SEO please feel free to contact us on : www.websitedesigners.fr/seo

For Web designing please feel free to contact us on : http://www.websitedesigners.fr/web-design