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URLs with query string

URL Definition

URL is an acronym for Uniform Resource Locator. Is an standard to identify documents or files over the internet.

Parts in any URL

Any URL is composed by this elements (some could be absent):

[scheme]://username:password@hostname/path?arg=value#anchor

Example URL

As an example, we are going to decompose this typical URL:

http://www.mywebpage.com/articles/show_article.php?id=23029

    [scheme]   => http
    [host]     => www.mywebpage.com
    [path]     => /articles/show_article.php
    [query]    => id=23029

The query string is what follows the ? symbol. In the example the query string is id=23029.

Query string and Search Engines

It is well known that search engines prefer static .html pages to dynamically generated ones.
Google doesn't like urls with query string. (See: Search engine guidelines)

So it is very important in a search engine optimization point of view to have static pages. If this is not possible, we can simulate static urls using some tricks with the webserver. So the content will still be dynamically generated, but without the query string.

URLs: Dynamic to Static

Ideally, all documents should be static .html files. This could be achieved doing a dump of the Databases in .html format. With this we also decrease de load of the server.

If this is not possible, we can simulate static content removing the query string in the urls. In this links there is some information, but is very technical.

• Apache on URL mapping:
  http://httpd.apache.org/docs/urlmapping.html
• Apache rewrite engine:
  http://httpd.apache.org/docs/misc/rewriteguide.html
• Apache .htaccess file:
  http://apache-server.com/tutorials/ATusing-htaccess.html

An example transforming a dynamic Url to static with Apache

Supposing we have a url like the one before:

http://www.mywebpage.com/articles/show_article.php?id=23029

We are going to convert it to one like this:

http://www.mywebpage.com/articles/23029.html

To do this changes we have to follow two steps:

• Use Apache rewrite engine module to pass the request to the old .php script.

  We will create an .htaccess file in the directory /articles/ with this content:

  RewriteEngine  on
  RewriteRule    ^/articles/(.+)\.html$  show_article.php?id=$1
  

• Change the all the old website links to reflect the new url style.

  As an example, in the file show_article.php, change this instructions:

  echo "<a href='http://www.mywebpage.com/articles/show_article.php?id=$code'> Article </a>";
  

  For the following equivalent:

  echo "<a href='http://www.mywebpage.com/articles/$code.html'> Article </a>";
  

  This sould be done wherever was a link towards the old url.

And that's all! Now we have "spider friendly" urls ;-)